Ski Safari, Heroes Call, and Hand of Fate developer Defiant Development from Australia is closing down. I woke up to seeing the official account for Defiant Development and Morgan Jaffit post a statement about what they plan on doing with existing games and the philosophy that they followed for nearly a decade. The news also comes with a new trailer for a project they were working on for a 2021 release called ‘A World In My Attic’. I discovered them with the fantastic Ski Safari that has been copied way too often on mobile. I still remember playing it on an old iPad. Check out some gameplay for it below:
The official statement posted by Morgan Jaffit begins by saying the team is looking for new roles in the industry. After beginning in 2010 Defiant Development wanted to create games that nobody else would and to be an Australian studio that owned its own IP. The statement also mentions that DEfiant Development’s existing games that are currently available will be supported just as maintenance.
The new project they revealed in the video above looks really interesting. Having watched this after reading the statement, I hope they can eventually realise their games in the future through other publishing houses or studios and hope everyone at the studio can find a new gig. If you’ve not checked out anything by them yet, the Hand of Fate games are excellent and available on PC and consoles including Nintendo Switch.
Sad news. I wish them the best going forward.
Feel really sad knowing I bought the amazing Hand of fate 2 in the Steam sale
This really sucks, games like Ski Safari were the best of its kind and they always made high quality games.
On the bright side, I'm happy they said they'll keep up maintenance on their games. That's very rare. Even big game companies show they don't care by just straight up removing old games because they don't want to maintain them. Happens all too often. I'm glad we should be able to keep playing their classics.
The “World in my attic”looks awesome with very beautiful graphics I hope that it is a 3D action adventure with RPG elements because such a great looking game deserves a great story and original gameplay mechanics. Only criticism it is such a long wait before we can play the game.