New information about In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor being pulled from sale (as well as plans for AI War 2: Rise from Ashes) has been posted by developer Arcen Games on the game's official Steam Community page.
On Friday, August 26, Arcen Games stated that they would be pulling In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor from sale and refunding all purchases. People who had paid for the game would be able to keep it and it would no longer be made available for sale. Since the announcement, a number of people purchased the game either with the intent to let Arcen Games keep the money or out of a desire to get the Early Access product for free. However, Steam employees were out of office at the time they intended to remove the game and it was only able to be accomplished recently.
The resulting complications have slightly changed the situation. Due to some people requesting no refund, the developer has made requesting a refund optional for purchasers of the title. However, refunding this way will remove the game from your library. If you would like to get a refund and keep it you can do so and then install it as a free-to-play game. The game does not have any sort of DRM and the developer has explicitly stated that you're free to make a backup of it if you're concerned about it disappearing. They maintain that they won't ever remove the free-to-play version of the game from the Steam store.
Further information on the canned plans for the game was also released with this post. A design document was released via a Steam community post detailing some of the planned enemies. A forum post acts as an FAQ covering most of the more common questions made in a multitude of threads. Trading cards were planned on being implemented, but as the free-to-play version contains no monetization whatsoever it's not available for the trading card feature. The images for the unreleased trading cars were peppered throughout today's announcement.
The developer has stated that they hope they can one day continue developing the game if it is financially viable, possibly in 2017 or 2018. If this were to come to pass it would be under the new name of In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor 2. The revived version of the game may potentially raise funding via crowdfunding beforehand.
For now, Arcen Games is going to be working on AI War 2: Rise from Ashes as a Kickstarter project which will eventually make its way onto Steam. If you'd like to kick a few dollars their way in the meantime, they have a tip jar on their site.
Quick Take
I bought this game as soon as I heard it was being pulled and I'm going to let Arcen Games keep their money purely on raptor-based loyalty. Having played it a bit, I easily think I'll get $4.49 worth of fun out of the title. I do hope that the dev can come back to this passion project one day if only for us to have a crazy robot-smashing raptor adventure for us to play. I hope it happens. In the meantime, I've nothing but respect for how Arcen Games has handled this situation and I wish them all the success in the world with AI War 2: Rise from Ashes.
Have you purchased In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor prior to it being pulled from sale? Do you hope that the game will one day continue development? How well do you think Arcen Games handled this whole situation? Will you be checking out AI War 2: Rise from Ashes? Let us know in the comments below!
