This was a pretty foregone conclusion if you’ve been following our coverage of the airship building survival title Lost Skies, but it does look as if developer Bossa Studios is going to have to, at least temporarily, move forward from the game and on to its next project, particularly as the survivalbox has not helped its financial situation.
We’ll start with that new game, which is called What Goes Up, a self-described “chaotic co-op physics-building game” that challenges players with using gravity guns to stack up objects into tall towers or other wobbly constructs within a set time limit. The game will be published by Team17 on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation 5 sometime later this year.
Connected to this new game announcement is a change for the Lost Skies Discord to a Bossa Games Discord, with new opt-in channels for members to select in order to be part of game communities, including the survivalbox’s. Further discussion with Bossa head Anthony Kyne has outlined the cold reality for the studio: Lost Skies has not made any money whatsoever and the tiny team needs to pivot in order to keep the lights on.
“The current player base for Lost Skies didn’t even cover the cost of making it. And we don’t see any of the money for sales of the game for a long time into the future, with the way the deal works,” he writes. “[T]here is only so much spare time we have to continue to improve the game. The rest of the time we have to make money to live. So we can do that by using our skills to make other games and try and make a profit and feed those back into Skies and other titles, or we can go and work a minimum wage job on zero-hour contracts and be too tired to spend any time and have no chance of a profit to put into Skies.”
In spite of that, Kyne promises that the devs are not abandoning Skies and that What Goes Up has been in development since before Skies was released. “[S]uccess is what drives the funding of updates,” Kyne says. “Lost Skies is a great game with a huge list of features and improvements we want to add to it, and we’ll continue to chip away at it although slower than we’d like.”
