Hello everyone,
Many of you have been following our adventures for the past 10 months. It’s time to give an important update on the current situation of the project. For those who haven’t been following from the start, I’ll give a brief recap.
Where we come from
The Ascent Quest project was born in 2021 from a small group of friends and ex-colleagues, with the goal of creating a high-quality online VR-RPG. After 2 years of developing in our spare time and using our own finances, we managed to create a really promising prototype. Given the scale of the project, we clearly needed funding to expand the team and be able to pay ourselves with full-time contracts. In short, we needed investors to fund the project. But to have a chance at finding them, we had to prove public interest in this project.
Like many other young studios, we decided to launch the Kickstarter early in the project, before we had enough funds to complete it. This campaign was a success—not as resounding as some of our former competitors—but a success nonetheless, raising €36,700 from 317 backers. This money allowed us to invest in some development equipment and to support two people working full-time: Cedrish and Kerohan. The next goal for both of us, was to focus on fundraising while continuing development and communication with the growing community. This phase was expected to last very few months at best. The amount we were seeking was €700k, far from the millions some managed to raise early on years ago.
However, this was a failure. We never found investors willing to follow us, despite having many positive discussions. One of the main reasons for the refusals was that the video game market is currently unstable, with many layoffs. Additionally, the global economic situation is not ideal, with major geopolitical instabilities. Moreover, VR is no longer in vogue for many investors, who are now focusing on AI.
All public subventions (from France, Europe, or region), bank loan, have also been refused—for sometimes very silly reasons, but we won’t dwell on that.
Recent Events
Faced with this initial failure, we turned to publishers, particularly those specializing in virtual reality. To support the studio during this phase and to have more promising numbers to show, we relaunched Patreon and offered the much-requested Supporter Packs. However, the numbers are not good, as we got €3,000 from these sales. It really helps us and we want to thank everyone who are buying Supporter Pack. Even though it’s a good number considering our community size, at the company level, this doesn’t allow us to sustain operations for a month.
Since the beginning, we’ve also been trying to raise awareness through devlogs and have attempted to contact several VR influencers and websites. All of them refuse to talk about us unless we pay significant amounts of money we don’t have yet (like €5,000 for one news article, €500 for a retweet…).
Today, several publishers have already indicated they won’t follow us or simply don’t respond. Apparently, we are not yet attractive enough for them. Is it a lack of followers on social media? Is the game not advanced enough without funding? We rarely received clear answers.
In short, we are in a critical situation and need to rethink our approach.
Foundations
Rest assured, we are not giving up. We promised you an excellent online VR RPG, and we fully intend to keep that promise! We simply have to take the worst path we had envisioned. But we had indeed anticipated it. We will fight for this project because we believe in it passionately, and we see a growing community that supports us.
Farworld Studio can no longer cover expenses and help us to pay the bills. But that doesn’t mean we’re slowing down everything. Cedrish continues to work in his spare time. As for Kerohan, he found a way to keep working double full-time like before for many months to come.
In terms of communication, we will post fewer devlogs in the coming months because they force us to change development priorities, which isn’t always good for the project. For example, if 3 months of technical server development are needed, the existence of devlogs requires us to prepare something else on the side to have something more fun to show.
Furthermore, the time spent on fundraising (almost 50% of it) will no longer be necessary so the only full-time developer (Kerohan) will be completely dedicated to the game development itself.
However, let’s be clear: one full-time developer on the project is far from enough to complete it, even working double full-time like it is currently the case. But we understand that we have to show something better and show more. So our goal is to finalize a playable version ready during 2025, that is more advanced than anything we’ve shown so far. As initially planned, we will first invite members with alpha access and invite more people once the game is getting more stable. We are also considering ending the NDA earlier than planned to allow the world to discover, follow and support the project sooner.
With this first version, we will again attempt to secure funding to expand the team. The main difference is that the full release of the game is likely to be pushed back, as we are forced to develop the first public alpha version of the game with a micro-team. Of course, we will still be on Discord, and we’ll keep you updated on our progress while posting screenshots and short videos as regularly as possible on all social media.
The journey continues and even though the path is much more difficult than we hoped, we are not giving up. We want that game and we will achieve it. As usual, the best way to help us is to talk about the project to your friends and gaming communities, follow us on social media, like and comment.
We want to thanks our community for supporting us in this project. You can’t imagine how much extra strength you give us to keep moving forward. See you soon!
