Hard to say.
Idea Fabrik is the developer behind the Hero Engine, a failed attempt at creating an MMO-specific game engine that never quite got off the ground. Mostly due to Idea Fabrik bankrupting most of the developers who licensed it via extortion-tier licensing fees and royalties. The only successful game to launch on the Hero Engine is Star Wars: The Old Republic, a game that barely has any original parts of the engine left in it.
But Idea Fabrik appears to have silently gone out of business. Following its unceremonious closure of The Repopulation earlier in January, The Repopulation was quietly and finally pulled from Steam earlier tonight on April 25. The game’s website is dead as is the game’s social media.
But so is Idea Fabrik as a company, evidently. Because in my search to see if the company had commented on the situation, I went to the Hero Engine website and found that it doesn’t work. Just completely offline. The Hero Engine website is dead and none of Idea Fabrik’s social media accounts are active. The Heroblade servers have also been offline for a few days now at least, according to the Hero Engine Discord users.
Is Idea Fabrik bankrupt and out of business? Probably. Very likely. We know that Idea Fabrik never filed their 2021 accounts at the end of 2022, that the company has had severe financial problems for a few years now, and hasn’t been licensing the engine to new clients in a few years.
RIP Hero Engine.
MMO Fallout 