Hopoo Games has made a genuinely shocking announcement, that has a lot more ramifications than it may appear at first.
They made this announcement on Twitter a few hours ago:
“Today, we have an exciting update: Duncan and Paul, alongside many other talented members at Hopoo Games, will now be working on game development directly at @valvesoftware!
We’re incredibly grateful to Valve for their partnerships in the last decade, and are excited to continue working on their awesome titles. However, this does mean that we are stopping production on our unannounced game, “Snail”.
It’s been an exciting and transformative 12 years. We feel lucky for the opportunities we’ve had, and deeply appreciate both our team and fans that have supported us and our games.
We love making games – and will continue to do so, for years to come. We’re excited to be working side-by-side with the talented people at Valve. But for now – sleep tight, Hopoo Games.”
Does it sound to you like Hopoo Games is closing, based on this statement? We’ll get back to that later.
Hopoo Games is best known for developing Risk of Rain, a roguelite co-op side-scroller with sprite graphics, all the way back in 2013. For the 2020 sequel Risk of Rain 2, Hopoo switched genres to make it a co-op 3D third person shooter roguelite. They also signed on with Gearbox Publishing to bring the game to consoles in 2019.
In 2022, Gearbox acquired the Risk of Rain IP, freeing up Hopoo to work on other projects. Earlier this year, Embracer sold Gearbox to Take-Two Interactive, and stated that that included the Risk of Rain IP.
So, a few days before this announcement, the Risk of Rain 2 Steam page put out an update explaining the state of the Seekers of the Storm expansion, and that the developers were planning to put out a PC patch soon. But, you may ask, if Take-Two owns this game now, who are the developers?
As it turns out, Hopoo was the developer, going back in to push the update. And based on this thread, a dev working on the game named Dee’ has been dropping a ton of revelations about what’s going on behind the scenes.
According to Dee’, Gearbox Publishing, who acquired the Risk of Rain IP, no longer exists to publish their game for them. This, and the fact that Hopoo was working with Valve this whole time, was the reason that Risk of Rain 2 was going unattended for some time. Dee’ then points out that Risk of Rain 2 needs a new publisher now for development to continue, and possibly for ports to other platforms to come in the future.
Dee’ hints at what possibly could be a bigger legal mess stemming from when Embracer sold Gearbox to Take-Two. Embracer said in their press release that Risk of Rain was going with Gearbox to Take-Two. However, Embracer retained the company called Gearbox Publishing. This publisher did not come from people who worked at Gearbox. It was originally called Perfect World, and it got renamed to reflect that it was being managed by Gearbox. It has since been renamed again to Arc Games.
As we pointed out above, it was Gearbox Publishing AKA Arc Games who made a deal to publish and acquire the Risk of Rain IP. So why did the Risk of Rain IP get split up from its publisher and presumed legal owner, Gearbox Publishing, AKA Arc Games? Why did Embracer and Take-Two Interactive let this IP, which is very much still being sold on Steam and other platforms, fall into ownership limbo?
Dee’ apparently is not part of the team working with Valve. As they also claim, Hopoo Games is not closing, but this deal with Valve does mean they are taking a sabbatical of sorts.
We congratulate Hopoo’s staff for this new opportunity, and we have a feeling we know what game they are working on. But now Risk of Rain fans are stuck in an awkward situation as they look for a publisher to keep the IP alive. Hopefully, Embracer and Take-Two take notice of what is going on and clear this up for everyone involved.
