Phosphor Games Studio prides ourselves in making great games, both published and original. Since we started in 2009, we’ve worked on and released 8 games and have 4 new games announced and releasing soon. We’re really proud of what we’ve been able to work on and accomplish as an indie studio in Chicago. Unfortunately, in our short history, there have been two titles, Project Awakened and Nether, that have not worked out exactly like we wanted. As an indie studio, the unfortunate truth is that sometimes, situations become out of your control for one reason or another. We’re writing to you in hopes that we can provide a bit more clarity.
Project Awakened was an exciting project we are still very passionate about. Our goals were ambitious and because of this, the project’s demands required a large amount of funds to complete it. We started a Kickstarter for 500,000 dollars in hopes of giving the game the chance to be fully realized. Unfortunately, we came up short. As per Kickstarter rules, we never received any funding. We tried to do a separate crowdsourcing opportunity, but that did not work either and all funding was returned. Again, Project Awakened is a very big idea that would take a higher amount of funding to work on it than we could do ourselves.
The game is still on our minds, and we hope our current projects will help us get back to it. However, we are extremely proud of our current games and we think everyone will love our new original, Corpse of Discovery as well as the other games we’re working on.
As for Nether, we were hired to take on the project by Nether Productions and we continued to work on the title through its release on Early Access on Steam. At that point, Nether Productions ended our contract and moved on to another developer. We have zero control over the title and never owned it to begin with. As we put so much effort and time into the game, we would love to see it fully realized.
Over the past year, there have been rumors floating around about what we’ve done with the money from Nether or from Project Awakened. We’ve heard people suggest that Nether was a cash grab. We’ve also heard that we stole the money from Project Awakened to make games like Nether or that we used all the money from Nether to fund our newest projects, only to leave Nether alone to die. None of these rumors are true. There’s no hint of truth to any of them. We were paid to work on Nether and once our contract ended, we moved on to new projects. Project Awakened funding was returned and all Kickstarter donations were never taken. A lot of the confusion probably comes from the fact that our name is still attached to Nether’s Steam page. We are aware of this issue, but, there’s nothing that can be done.
Every other title our studio has worked on has been fully completed and nearly all of them have been released, often to critical success. We appreciate our passionate fans who love the titles we’ve worked on and expect the best from us. Looking past Nether and in to our future, our first goal is to make our fans happy and will keep working tirelessly to make that happen. We are very sorry for how Nether turned out and we now take serious measures to ensure something like that could never happen again. We think you’ll all love our new titles and will always keep our fans up to date if Project Awakened returns.
In the meantime, please enjoy Corpse of Discovery and the other exciting games we have in the pipeline.
Thank you,
Phosphor