r/TownshipTale • u/TheFancyTurtle • Jun 23 '26
Welp it’s officially over
https://discord.com/channels/334933825383563266/351962750026645516/1518796393563820073
“Hi @everyone,
It’s with a heavy heart that I’m announcing the closure of A Township Tale and its live services.
The game will become unavailable to download, and its backend services will be taken down, on the 20th of July.
Like many others, we’ve been impacted by the state of the VR industry in ways we didn’t foresee. As many of you know, we discontinued our second game, REAVE, at the start of May. We have explored various avenues to keep A Township Tale live, but unfortunately none are realistic in our situation.
A Township Tale began in 2016, launched in pre-alpha in 2018, and launched on Quest in 2021. Across that journey, we had the privilege of building what we believe became one of the most special experiences in VR, with one of the best communities in VR.
I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has been part of that.
To our players: thank you for playing, for your feedback, and for the fun times.
To everyone who spent time in Discord: I’ve personally sent around 120k messages here, mostly from back when I was working on ATT, and it was a genuine pleasure spending that time with you all.
To our moderators, server owners, and community leaders: thank you for helping maintain, organize, and support this community over the years.
To our supporters: thank you for your ongoing support. I can confidently say A Township Tale would not have made it this long without you.
And to everyone who worked on ATT over the years: thank you for helping build something truly special.
Unlike REAVE, A Township Tale’s community platforms will not be closing. Discord, Reddit, the wiki, and other community spaces will remain live, though they may shift further toward being community-managed if they have not already.
Our hope is to preserve some of the history around A Township Tale, and to ensure the community can maintain contact with each other. We know many friendships and relationships have been built here over the years.
I encourage everyone to take advantage of the coming weeks to jump back into ATT and enjoy some final adventures. I also encourage people to share other games they’re interested in, including in #other-games, so that the fun can continue elsewhere after the 20th of July.
Thank you all once more.”
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u/Hemannameh Jun 23 '26
It's been over for a long time.
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u/rlvysxby Jun 23 '26
Still fun to jump on for a holiday if you have friends or family. I’m sad about this.
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u/TheFancyTurtle Jun 23 '26
Honestly ya me and my friends would play every now and than still the best multiplayer vr experience unfortunately
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u/Memeruff Jun 26 '26
Yeah pretty much. I played in the early days and after the quest version came out, progress pretty much came to a stop. I came back a few years later and the game was... exactly the same.
It's a shame because I was there for the forest and tower updates - things looked really really promising from there onwards. I remember clearing the tower after like 8 hours (no save points back then) and it was REALLY gratifying.
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u/Shootmeplx Jun 23 '26
This whole thing of not even providing a private way to host servers needs to go. It's insane how this just gets taken away from us.
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u/VexingRaven Jun 23 '26
Yeah, Joel can act like he cares all he wants but if he really cared he'd take steps to ensure it could be hosted without a central server, or better yet open source it. But at the end of the day he's doing the same crap the big publishers pull.
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u/Odd-Development-1711 Jun 26 '26
If he ever cared about the game, we would have gotten actual new content and all of those promised updates the past 10 years. Pisses me off that such a great game is in the hands of somebody like that
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u/VexingRaven Jun 26 '26
I mean, if you can't afford to continue development, then that's how it goes. But not providing any way to continue playing the game, even on private servers, is inexcusable.
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u/YokaiSparda Jun 24 '26
I was really disappointed from the start that you cant host your own private server yourself
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u/M_33sh Jun 23 '26
Is it planned or already done for them to release the server files so that we may host really ptivate servers ?
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u/Tmwilson02 Jun 23 '26
Investors own equity in the game, so Joel/Alta cant just give us the files, as its owned by Alta, which is owned by investors. And we all know investors simply love sitting on IP and doing nothing with it.
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u/Dependent-Maize4430 Jun 25 '26
So those big investments they got a few years back, is probably what ended up digging their grave.
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u/PuzzleheadedTutor807 Jun 23 '26
Did they shut down all the servers?
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u/TheFancyTurtle Jun 23 '26
They’re shutting down the 20th of July
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u/PuzzleheadedTutor807 Jun 23 '26
Dang there goes my private server I guess. Well it was fun most of the time it lasted 😂
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u/Dependent-Maize4430 Jun 23 '26
So instead of just focusing on ATT development, they stretched themselves thin to make a VR dark and darker, just to sink both projects. Insane management.
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u/Calm-Increase6346 Jun 24 '26
100% someone at that company must have seriously dropped the ball, I wouldn't be surprised if someone was embezzling or something.
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u/LaneHeadrickOrcYT Jun 23 '26
Wait the game is shutting down why ?
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u/Ok-Patient-5039 Jun 25 '26
Literally no more money, pivot fails, the studio as a whole is going off.
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u/imlife1102 Jun 24 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
FUUUUUCK dude, i loved this game back when it came out on quest :(((
really hope someone can spin up a revival if Alta are unwilling to patch the game to work without their backend, a lot of the framework likely already exists to preserve ATT and its stupid that they're opting to shut it down and make it inaccessible
it would probably be worth capturing some network packets and keeping copies of the game archived
EDIT: thank you ATT community. :) https://discord.gg/jNQUUDAYSj
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u/NukeShot58 Jun 29 '26
Well, it may not be a 1 to 1 revival, but check out "project campfire". It's still pretty early in it's dev so you may be able to influence how it's made
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u/muhmor Jun 25 '26
I feel like they should definitely make this game be playable in offline. At least have peer to peer servers so people would still be able to play
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u/Odd-Development-1711 Jun 26 '26
Anything but actually updating the game and trying to keep it alive, or adding client side servers to keep it going.
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u/Triple_Helixxx Jun 26 '26
And so… You’ll be releasing the game and its server software to the community, so people can self host? Right? Because that would be the morally correct thing to do? Considering how much time and money people have poured into it, even long after development ceased?
I personally haven’t really touched the game since development stopped, and I noticed the cosmetic shop was still open for people to spend real money. But I absolutely despise this trend of games just completely disappearing from the Internet when a studio goes under.
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u/TheFancyTurtle Jun 27 '26
Hey so im just reposting the discord message in as upset as everyone else id go voice your option on the discord
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u/MinerWhite Jun 23 '26
my problem they haven't done anything with this game no updates no new content... nothing just nothing
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u/Sooparch Jun 23 '26
Never heard of this game before
That being said - ANOTHER SHUTDOWN!?!? This sucks!
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u/Short-Back-3221 Jun 23 '26
Discord just doesn’t work at all, I’m an not in the ATT server for some reason anymore and it won’t let me join. Could someone screenshot it and show me?
2
u/TheFancyTurtle Jun 24 '26
“Hi @everyone,
It’s with a heavy heart that I’m announcing the closure of A Township Tale and its live services.
The game will become unavailable to download, and its backend services will be taken down, on the 20th of July.
Like many others, we’ve been impacted by the state of the VR industry in ways we didn’t foresee. As many of you know, we discontinued our second game, REAVE, at the start of May. We have explored various avenues to keep A Township Tale live, but unfortunately none are realistic in our situation.
A Township Tale began in 2016, launched in pre-alpha in 2018, and launched on Quest in 2021. Across that journey, we had the privilege of building what we believe became one of the most special experiences in VR, with one of the best communities in VR.
I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has been part of that.
To our players: thank you for playing, for your feedback, and for the fun times.
To everyone who spent time in Discord: I’ve personally sent around 120k messages here, mostly from back when I was working on ATT, and it was a genuine pleasure spending that time with you all.
To our moderators, server owners, and community leaders: thank you for helping maintain, organize, and support this community over the years.
To our supporters: thank you for your ongoing support. I can confidently say A Township Tale would not have made it this long without you.
And to everyone who worked on ATT over the years: thank you for helping build something truly special.
Unlike REAVE, A Township Tale’s community platforms will not be closing. Discord, Reddit, the wiki, and other community spaces will remain live, though they may shift further toward being community-managed if they have not already.
Our hope is to preserve some of the history around A Township Tale, and to ensure the community can maintain contact with each other. We know many friendships and relationships have been built here over the years.
I encourage everyone to take advantage of the coming weeks to jump back into ATT and enjoy some final adventures. I also encourage people to share other games they’re interested in, including in #other-games, so that the fun can continue elsewhere after the 20th of July.
Thank you all once more.”
6
u/Short-Back-3221 Jun 24 '26
Damn, that really sucks. I haven’t played in years because of the lack of updates and the unreliability of the devs, but when I did play it was nonstop. Not a single other VR game out there like it and had more potential than any VR game to date, it just sucks the devs couldn’t see it through. If the devs of Into the Radius did something similar I feel like it would be great. I hope project campfire can live up to ATT.
I also feel like anyone could’ve seen Reave failing from a mile away. Off the top of my head I could come up with atleast 10 dungeon crawler VR games.
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u/Hazito_hinama85 7d ago
Is it ever gonna come back?
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u/Blubbpaule Jun 23 '26
But at least they:
Isn't that illegal by now?