Keen Software House has announced Medieval Engineers Community Edition, a new initiative that will let volunteer developers work on a game that ended development back in 2020.
Medieval Engineers is ye olde counterpart to Keen Software House's Space Engineers. Space Engineers has had a fair amount of success over the years, launching version 1.0 in 2019 and bringing crossplay to Xbox last year. Medieval Engineers, however, had effectively stopped development back in 2020. That all changes today with the new "Community Edition" initiative.
How Medieval Engineers Community Edition Will Let Development Continue
First and foremost, Medieval Engineers Community Edition is going to focus on "improvements, bug fixes, and quality of life changes" according to a lengthy blog post from Keen Software House Founder, CEO, and Creative Director Marek Rosa. Keen Software House won't be doing the development, though -- a team of volunteer developers from the game's community will be taking on that job.
"Our long-term goal, and the goal of our volunteer developers, is to continue expanding the modding possibilities of Medieval Engineers while also ensuring that the Community Edition stays stable," read the blog post.
"We will continue to build partnerships between Keen Software House and our incredible community. It is through these relationships that projects like this are possible."
Development of Medieval Engineers originally halted due to the unfortunate realities of business. Space Engineers was making enough money to justify continuing development and the same couldn't be said for Medieval Engineers. Given the choice, it decided to end development on its medieval crafting sandbox game.
The move was not without criticism. Even today, the game continues to attract negative reviews on Steam due to reports of it being an unfinished, buggy mess. The new community-led initiative could serve to mitigate some of these issues in the short term. In the future, we may very well see new features get developed for the game.
Volunteer staff will be taking on the role of active development; Keen Software House will be falling back into a support role for this initiative. You can opt-in to the Community Edition build on the Steam Betas tab, but you'll need the game to play it -- you can buy Medieval Engineers for PC via Steam at the price of $9.99 or your regional equivalent.
