Back in August of 2021 developer Supercell formally announced Everdale to the world, a cooperative city building game that had already been in a smaller form of beta testing under a different name for at least a year prior. That announcement kicked off a larger-scale soft launch for Everdale, and for the next year the game amassed a decent pool of players who all seemed to be really devout fans of the game. Everdale was a pretty different beast from most of Supercell’s other titles in that there was no competitive aspects to the game, no opening the app and seeing your beautiful city destroyed while you were away, and overall the whole vibe was just way more chill and friendly as the community of players all worked together to build something great. Here’s one of the game’s trailers to give you an idea of what Everdale was all about.

Well, as is pretty well known at this point, Supercell can be pretty aggressive in terms of keeping a game in soft launch until they feel it’s ready or even full blown cancelling a game because they feel it’s not up to snuff, even if that game has had years of work and resources poured into it. Unfortunately, after a bit over a year of that expanded soft launch, this was how they felt about Everdale and last October they decided to officially pull the plug. It’s tough to say exactly why they did this, but whatever the reason they seemed genuinely bummed to be shutting Everdale down and as I already mentioned the game had accumulated a very loyal set of fans who were all extremely upset to see a game they had been loving go to that great app store in the sky.

Several months removed from the game’s shutdown and VentureBeat is now reporting that there may be a second chance for the beloved Everdale as Supercell has officially sold off the game to fellow developer Metacore, who most people would know from their mega hit with the viral advertising Merge Mansion. There are plenty of interesting details in the full story at VentureBeat so be sure to give it a read, but the main points are that Metacore will be stripping the game as it is now down into parts to evaluate what they think works and what they think doesn’t, and then will basically build the game back up from scratch. This means that IF there is another release down the road, don’t expect anything this year, and also expect that the game could change quite a bit should that point ever come. Metacore sees potential in the game so I’d imagine they want to keep the core tenets in place, but they also could add or remove features as they see fit.

That said, SOME chance Everdale returns in some form is much better than the game just remaining dead. Metacore has a similar philosophy to Supercell in terms of how rigorously they work on a game before feeling it’s fully ready to be deployed, so it’s anyone’s guess as to when a new version of Everdale might ever show up. The important thing here though is that there’s at least some hope for the future of this game that people seem to love but never got its chance to fully shine.

[Via VentureBeat]