Supercell is pretty well known for how hard they beta test or soft launch games before officially releasing them, and how high their own standards are for quality. In fact I’ve heard that there are numerous games that go through months or years of development without even seeing the light of day outside of the company. It’s why Supercell only has a handful of released games despite being in business for more than a decade, but also why all of those games show a level of polish that’s rarely matched in the mobile space. They put in the work to iron out all kinks and shape the gameplay into something that’s both fun for their players and profitable for them as a company before widely releasing a game.
So last year when Supercell formally introduced Everdale, a new casual city-builder with a focus on cooperative play, it wasn’t surprising that it had actually already been in early phases of soft launch under a different name for close to a year already. That formal unveiling and rebranding under the name of Everdale kicked off a wider soft launch in more countries, but a full global rollout was still undetermined as the game continued to go through its testing phases. Here’s the Everdale trailer to give you an idea of what it was all about.
Being that we’re all familiar with how Supercell operates, I said in our Everdale post from last year that “Supercell is very Valve-like in that they’ll take as much time as they feel they need to get something right, and if a game still doesn’t feel like it has that “special sauce" even after months or even years of beta testing, they aren’t afraid to just scrap it and move on to something else." Well, a little over a year into that expanded soft launch, and that is exactly what they’re doing with Everdale. The official Everdale Twitter account posted that development of the game would be discontinued, and in an accompanying Reddit post, they provided more details on timing and compensation for current soft launch players.
In-app purchases and in-game friend referrals have already been shut off, and the game’s servers will officially shut down on October 31st at 10am UTC. There’s also the ability to transfer any in-game purchases you made in Everdale to one of Supercell’s other officially released games (Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Hay Day, Boom Beach, and Brawl Stars) which is a pretty cool move. I mean, as far as these shut downs go, I guess. It’s a bummer because it seems everyone who played Everdale really loved its no-stress, non-competitive, cooperative city-building nature, especially in the face of so many other hyper-competitive PvP mobile games out there. We’ll probably never know exactly why Supercell ultimately pulled the plug on this one but I hope it doesn’t mean there’s no market for this type of super chill experience in the future.
