Development on the Steam Greenlight title Towns has been abandoned after funds for the game have dried up., developer Florian Frankenberger has announced. The city-builder project was cancelled due to poorer than expected sales figures and a lack of capital to back its development.
In Frankenberger’s statement on the official Towns website, he stated that the game is selling a third of what he and the game’s co-developer Xavi Canal needed to keep the project alive.
“When I signed up for working on Towns I was told that we sell a minimum of about x copies/month of the game,” Frankenberger wrote. “I agreed to work on Towns for 15% of what would remain after removing all the taxes and the Steam fee. Xavi and I agreed that this would be a fair amount, and I still think it is.
“After getting used to the source code and publishing the first new version of the game, we talked about the agreed payment and it turns out that the sales are getting down rapidly. So we are now selling less than a third of the x copies a month, losing about 33% of sales per month.
“To be completely honest, I can’t work for that little amount. I have to pay for the rent and food and this doesn’t really suffice for any of it. I also settled for the 15% of the minimum of x copies which is already well below my normal sallary.”
Among various possibilities, Frankenberger says he may make Towns an open-source title, allowing the community to continue its development where he left off.
