The Walking Dead: Betrayal is set for delisting next week.
They revealed this news on their Steam updates page:
“After considering a variety of paths forward, and with a great deal of discussion and reflection, Skybound Games and Other Ocean Interactive have decided to stop development on The Walking Dead: Betrayal.
Despite the hard work put into the game, we were not able to find a path to build the spirited community of backstabbers we originally envisioned.
On December 11, we will begin the process of removing the game from Steam, and as of December 15 the game will be shut down.
All players who purchased the game will receive a full refund. We will provide updates on refunds here on Steam and on the TWD: Betrayal Discord.”
Surprisingly, it seems the issues surrounding this game were pretty well known to the players who did get onto it. A Steam review from someone named Pybro shared a detailed explanation of the situation here. We will summarize, but first, an explanation:
This game is The Walking Dead version of Project Winter. Which is to say, it’s an eight player multiplayer game with cooperative and betrayal mechanics. And yes, if you were wondering, that does make it akin to Among Us, as well.
While Project Winter is nowhere near as successful as Among Us, it has still seen some commercial and a lot of critical success, having been ported to just about every platform. The Walking Dead: Betrayal could have done that.
To summarize Pybro’s points, The Walking Dead: Betrayal could have copied Project Winter’s gameplan and coasted on the license’s popularity. Unfortunately, developer Other Ocean released the game in an unfinished state. Now, this is a bad decision, but not one that can ruin a game’s chances completely. But what they did next did ruin it.
Other Ocean chose to cut the game’s price in half, and then put it up on Early Access. Presumably, the Early Access status would give them a free pass while they sought to fix the game.
But Other Ocean’s real mistake, according to Pybro, was that they didn’t put the game up onto a free weekend. What a multiplayer game like The Walking Dead: Betrayal needs is an active player base, and if people can’t even jump into the game for free, then they had no chance of amassing that base.
This follows the failure of The Walking Dead: Overkill, and IP owner Skybound doesn’t seem to know where to take their property after Telltale made them famous in the video game sphere over a decade ago. It’s certainly a strange state of affairs given what Telltale itself went through.
