Developer makes us glad they’ve shut down.
TitanReach is dead, and so is Square Root Studios, and this may be the first time a developer has ever given us reason to be happy that a game died in the womb. If you haven’t been keeping up with the news, earlier this morning TitanReach just vanished. The Discord server is gone, their social media has been deleted, and the whole thing is dead. For real this time, not like when TitanReach was shut down the last time and then suddenly got an angel investor to fully fund it.
But look at the bright side; we never got to see TitanReach launch. In a post put up before the Discord was deleted, we got a glimpse at some of the plans that Square Root Studios had for TitanReach. This may surprise you, as it was never to our knowledge proffered to the public. SRS had planned to integrate NFTs and crypto into the game.
Yes, the plan was to run the game into the ground by allowing players to mine crypto by linking a wallet and generating small amounts by killing monsters and bosses. Another aspect of the plan was to let players spend a small amount of gold to mint items into NFTs, thus further promoting the game being overrun by bots, farmers, and criminals. Square Root Studios had all the plans in place to make sure their free to play game was sieged by bots, its economy broken like a porcelain doll under the tire of an 18-wheeler semi, and potentially a bigger slap in the face to backers who funded the title than it is as a dead, unreleased product.
So be happy. Square Root Studios has saved us months of articles discussing their inevitable incompetence at dealing with cheats, exploits, dupes, and bots. We won’t have to report about how the legitimate population of the game left in droves due to rampant chat spam, exploits, scams, and bot accounts hogging resources. There will be no articles about Square Root’s feeble attempts at rebuilding their player trust following the utter destruction of TitanReach as a viable product. Especially once the title cut off a big group of people as it wouldn’t be allowed on Steam.
There’s bound to be people upset or angry that their backing of TitanReach won’t result in a released game. But after learning what it was going to be, are you really that upset anymore? I’ll leave you with a comment from Square Root’s Unravel;
Not every game is out to scam you, but that didn’t seem to stop SRS from trying to turn the game into a scam anyway. For many of our readers this will just be another example of MMOs linked to the blockchain/crypto being questionable at best, and underhanded scams at worst. Don’t crowdfund MMOs.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.