Alta announced it’s sunsetting multiplayer RPG A Township Tale (2021) next month, making for a second bit of bad news this year since the studio pulled the plug on its follow-up game, Reave.
Alta co-founder and CTO Joel van de Vorstenbosch announced the news on the game’s Discord, noting the studio explored multiple avenues of keeping the game alive, which ultimately failed.
Now, the game is scheduled to go dark on July 20th, which also includes pulling it from the Quest Store and shutting down the game’s PC VR installer.
Here’s van de Vorstenbosch’s full statement:
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.
A Township Tale is what you might call an MMO-like, as it offers up an open-world environment with a wide variety of roles so users can survive, craft, and build up an abandoned settlement together. It only supports up to 8 players on Quest and 40 on PC VR, however it was one of those games that easily tricked you into thinking it was much larger.
Initially launched in early access on PC VR headsets in 2018, the successful launch on Quest in 2021 allowed Alta to attract over $12 million in investment, which at the time was used to expand the studio and accelerate development of A Township Tale.
Then, in 2024, the studio announced it was working on ‘Project 2’, later revealed to be extraction-style multiplayer dungeon crawler Reave.
Although the studio progressed to the point of hosting months of open playtesting, Reave was ultimately cancelled in May 2026, with the studio citing “increasingly difficult market conditions.”
The Sydney, Australia-based studio hasn’t announced layoffs, and the size of the studio is not certain at this time. Following its $12 million funding raise in 2022, the studio said it was “more than two-dozen and growing,” having scaled up from its original three-person founding team.
