Studio Roqovan is shutting down and it is taking with it the promising first-person shooter World Wars Toons.
"Bigger bad news is that Studio Roqovan is no more," its Facebook post reads. "We really tried our best to make the game happen, but it wasn't to be."
Why The Studio Is Shutting Down
In an e-mail to UploadVR, James Chung, studio's CEO, talked about Studio Roqovan's closing, attributing it to the slow adaptation of the VR market's growth. Chung further admitted his failure to raise enough funding to launch World War Toons properly and do live ops.
Chung said World Wars Toons was available on PSVR for about eight months with the purpose of testing and network issues. It was successful that they developed an improved version of the game from the test. However, there was an issue of finances that the production of this version had to halt.
He also cited "VR winter," which happened following a wave of consumers' interest in VR after Facebook acquired Oculus. After the VR frenzy, it was a difficult period for developers in which the consumers were slow to adapt VR and the funding is now dried up.
The slow start of VR made it a difficult market for game developers and start-ups alike. There are hopes that new, most accessible headsets will arrive soon, and the consumer adoption will reach a tipping point and the industry will take off.
World War Toons VR Development
World War Toons, a multiplayer FPS set in a cartoony version of World War II, features Virtual Reality support. Formerly named Reload Studios, Studio Roqovan was able to raise 4 million dollars in 2015 to fund the development of this title.
The game launched in open beta in the United States when Sony's PlayStation VR headset was released in October 2016. The gaming studio, however, removed the title from the PlayStation Store in September 2017. Since then, the title has never returned to the PlayStation Store.
"Increasing difficulty of having both VR and 2D gameplay interacting together began to compromise what we could make at the timeframe we wanted to keep," the game studio explained.
The intellectual property rights for World War Toons will now go to a new firm.
Metal Slug Crossover
In September last year, Studio Roqovan announced its partnership with SNK Corporation to develop an arcade crossover between World War Toons and the Metal Slug franchise. SNK is a Japanese video game hardware and software company who owns the SNK video game brand and Neo Geo video game platform.
Last week, the studio revealed in a Facebook post that the game is already playable in Korean arcades. However, the Metal Slug content is now completely removed due to unfortunately unresolved issues. The original World War Toons has to be "put to sleep" also.
