Techland has ended content support for Dying Light: The Beast. Founder and chief executive Paweł Marchewka announced the decision during a Discord AMA with fans of the studio's parkour zombie series, IGN reports.
The Beast launched last year as a standalone game, having originally been positioned as an expansion for Dying Light 2. Its most recent addition was the Restored Land update, which let players clear zombies across the map and bring civilization back to the world.
Dying Light: The Beast is a complete game, and that's how players should approach it — much like Dying Light 1 is today. We're not planning substantial new content for it.
Marchewka said the game had been planned as a "complete, self-contained game from the start," and that Techland had never committed to supporting it long term. The studio still shipped substantial free updates over the past year, among them Restored Land and new weapons.
Why Techland is stepping back
Marchewka put the decision down to the economics of long-tail support. "The five-year support model hasn't worked as well for us as we hoped," he said. "We're an AAA studio. With each new game, we want to deliver an unforgettable experience and push the boundaries of what games can do."
He said keeping older titles running pulls directly against new production. "Supporting existing games for years with smaller teams can seriously disrupt work on new projects," he said, adding that player expectations compound the problem: "At the same time, players expect frequent, substantial, high-quality updates — sometimes several times a month, and usually for free. With limited resources, we can end up disrupting production and still disappointing players."
Dying Light 2 continues to receive support, and IGN reports its update team is larger than the one Dying Light ever had.
Techland's next release was to have been its fantasy RPG project, which was cancelled last year. The Xbox One and PS4 versions of The Beast were also cancelled earlier this year. The studio has not said what it is working on now.
