The Game Band is shutting down Blaseball

destructoid.com:

The bizarre internet sports-sim Blaseball is coming to a close. Developer The Game Band has announced that it’s ending Blaseball ahead of its new era, and laying off some staff in the process.

Posted on The Game Band’s Medium page, the studio confirms Blaseball is headed to an end, rather than its planned Coronation Era. In short, Blaseball “isn’t sustainable” to keep running.

“Since Blaseball’s inception, we’ve been fighting against the amount of work it takes to keep Blaseball true to itself while financially supporting the team and keeping our staff healthy,” the dev team wrote. “We’ve tried countless solutions to make it work, and we’ve come to the conclusion that this fight isn’t one we can win in the long run. The cost, literally and metaphorically, is too high. So we are making the decision to end it here instead of changing Blaseball into something unrecognizable.”

As part of this, The Game Band is also parting ways with “many” of its team members. The team had grown in order to start making some of its plans work for the rebooted Blaseball.

I stumbled across Blaseball the way I imagine many early participants did. It was a social media hit during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you never got around to learning about it, Blaseball mixed a running fantasy sports sim of baseball with narrative mechanics that let players vote on different decrees and rules, which would shift the game in unforeseen and interesting ways. Sometimes another base would appear, or stats would go up. And other times, players would rise from the dead.

This community participation, combined with the sparse text interface filled with wildly inventive names like “Jaylen Hotdogfingers” or the Baltimore Crabs, was a blessing in 2020.