'Strange things began to happen'—how a Ukrainian studio lost its game, saw it botted to hell, and saved it

pcgamer.com:

There are so many games on Steam it's impossible to get your head around the sheer number of them. I look at Steam nearly every day of my life, I check the charts and the new releases, sometimes I dig a little deeper on the data: but there's so much that you could keep going forever. No wonder stuff just gets lost.

Robowars feels like one of those games most players will never hear of. There isn't much exceptional about this old tower defence game (good name though) which is, shall we say, heavily inspired by Plants vs. Zombies and was first released in 2014. There is something unusual about it though: it was seemingly abandoned, then around two years ago it disappeared.

And then, a few days ago, it suddenly reappeared. With a patch fixing all the things players had complained about. What gives? Sounds like the publisher's bank balance did, and maybe more.

«It wasn't easy, but we did it,» writes Robowars developer N-Game Studios, which is based in the Ukrainian town of Dnepr and has been operating since 2002. «Several years ago we lost contact with our publisher. It was quite insulting and frustrating to watch what happens with the game and not be able to somehow influence it! Also, we didn't receive any sales reports and royalties for some years.»

During this time N-Game was in the dark about what was happening, and later learned the publisher was going through bankruptcy proceedings, as part of which the game was removed from Steam. Now, the studio has been able to recover the rights to Robowars and return it to Steam.

To celebrate, N-Game says, «we have prepared an updated build that fixes several critical bugs and improves game balance and localization.» N-Game adds it is «grateful to the Steam team for helping us