Dear Community,

We now are able to give you insight on our likely last big Update for A Year of Rain. We are sorry for the time of silence, though we wanted to be completely sure, that everything will work out as we decided on. This means as well, that the Update will already hit in the next 2 days. Our goal from the start was to show our own individual passion and love for the RTS genre, and simultaneously gain new experiences in the world of competitive titles. Over the course of this period we have received a lot of feedback – both positive and negative, but usually constructive. We have had tournaments with RTS veterans giving us their opinions and praise and we have had great, honest talks with our community on Discord, Steam and at conventions like Gamescom, PAX South/West, Wacken Open Air, Igromir, Dreamhack and others. Unfortunately, even when this was more than we ever could have asked for on the emotional, personal side – the low player base that you have witnessed yourselves hurts us substantially - We reached no more than 5000 players worldwide until today. We are deeply sorry for everyone who felt, or will feel, let down by us and the path we had to choose, considering we are an independent studio with limited resources.

We have decided to put the active development of A Year Of Rain on hold and minimize recurring costs by replacing the official game servers with a new P2P System. You will still be able to play multiplayer matches by opening up a lobby that others can join but there will not be any automatic matchmaking anymore.

This means as well, that Leaderboards and player statistics will disappear, but, as a positive side effect, portraits and titles are automatically unlocked from the beginning.
For now, there will be no further additions or significant improvements to the game. Unfortunately, this means that some of the changes we were working on – like the revamped pathfinding – will not be coming.

Currently we had to choose between the existing pathfinding system, which is not working ideally but functional, and the new pathfinding system, which is more advanced but simply not yet functional at all. There are just no easy or quick solutions for this situation, since the low sales and player base restrict us from finalizing the new pathfinding.

However, we will still release the remaining maps as well as the new game mode “Against All Odds” when we make the switch to the new version. While the new content does not quite match the usual level of quality that we have set as the bar for ourselves, we believe we should not hold them back and really wanted to share what some team members spent their last two years working on.

To learn more about the changes we are implementing you can find a detailed changelog below. Please excuse that this is in English only.

We hope that you understand the situation we were facing and still find enjoyment with the game in its new form. We were able to preserve as much as possible of the experience and we hope that you are able to see our effort in doing so.

Thank you for the overwhelming support you have shown since we launched. You gave us the needed strength to deal with the very painful decision we had to make. Hopefully we made up to it with this specific way of handling the unfortunate circumstances.

Best Regards - The A Year Of Rain Team


Patch Notes: A Year of Rain Hotfix