Hey everyone, Idlescape will be entering the sunsetting stage after this patch goes live. This means we'll stop accepting microtransaction purchases and move from active development to just maintenance. The game will continue running until our rented time expires on the last day of November. IS+ will be globally given to all players until the time expires and I will manually cancel further recurring payments for all existing subscriptions.
Working on Idlescape and playing with you all has made for an incredible last few years, but with growing time constraints IRL and the volunteer-style team backing the game it is no longer feasible to continue supporting the game as it is. A couple weeks ago we explored the option of pushing to 1.0 once legal hurdles had been handled, but the sheer amount of work we have to do with the little time we have to do it means this year+ indefinite pre-1.0 state would keep going. Not only this, but if we did push to 1.0, the workload would only increase. The scope of the game is just excessively large for a purely volunteer team to handle without burning out.
That said, with the last legal hurdles (TL;DR IP Rights) handled, there are still several avenues for Idlescape to continue, even if only spiritually. The existing codebase and assets will continue to exist so that personal projects from the team may pop up; I (Nick) will probably start tinkering with a much more limited scope game using what I've learned and made over the last few years, but I don't expect to have something playable for a while.
The Discord will remain open and what we do is up to the community. I'm leaning towards keeping the main chat channels open and archiving the rest. I'm personally going to share whatever I'm up to there and to keep up with y'all and the team.
I will continue to restart the server to keep it running (mostly) smoothly, as well as push any patches that the CCs prepare.
Who knows what the future holds, though?
