Iron Guard Salvation, the successor to 2021’s Iron Guard, has only sold one-fifth the sales of the original game.
This, along with strong feedback from the PlayStation community, prompted developer Xlab Digital to develop Iron Guard: Day Zero for PS5. Day Zero releases this week on June 18.
As part of this shift in strategy, the original flatscreen Steam version of Iron Guard has been ‘retired’ and included for free for all existing and future owners of either VR game. Xlab says it hopes to bring Day Zero to Steam at a later date.
Responding to an inquiry about Day Zero on Reddit, Xlab responded with the following:
Not done with VR for sure, but taking a pause as it has been a rough patch trying to find enough players to continue, even after excellent reviews across all VR platforms.
I’m hoping flat-screen might create some more awareness, especially because we are heavily discounting the price and hopefully players can try the VR version ultimately , which I (and many players even not into TD genre games) feel is a whole different experience in VR.
Xlab continued in another response:
… as a small team we are not expecting to retire/own islands, just continue pushing our skills and do more bigger VR titles, for which we don’t need a huge number of sales, but even that seems to be a challenge over the last year.
Funny/Sad enough the first IRON GUARD VR game made a decent return, in fact it funded the entire sequel IRON GUARD: Salvation , but the sequel which is a bigger game and with much higher fidelity and more fun gameplay features, etc. seems to be harder to sell and has done 1/5th the sales, which says something about the VR trend over the last 2-3 years
This continues the trend of over a dozen VR developers either going to a hybrid model or flatscreen altogether for upcoming projects due to a struggling VR market. Recently, Polyarc Games laid off two-thirds of its staff and announced a flatscreen port of its Moss series for PC and consoles and Vertigo Games closed one of its studios and announced a flatscreen port of the Arizona Sunshine series on the heels of its flatscreen port of The 7th Guest remake.
Both Iron Guard games are available on SteamVR, PlayStation VR2, and Meta Quest.
