Dead Cells Ending Development After Content Update 35

Motion Twin and Evil Empire have announced they are ending development on Dead Cells.

As announced on social media and on Steam, Update 35 “The End Is Near” will be the final update released for Dead Cells. This comes after 5 years of ongoing development on the roguelike, including DLCs, regular updates, crossovers, and more. The reasoning behind this decision is to focus attention on new projects, including Windblown for Motion Twin and “Secret Projects” for Evil Empire.

However, not everyone involved in the game’s development is happy about this decision. In a post on his official website, Sébastien Bénard, Dead Cells‘ former lead designer who left Motion Twin in 2020, criticized their decision to end support of the game. Bénard believes the abrupt termination of Dead Cells‘ development is unfair to the players who still enjoy the game, as well as to Evil Empire who continued to passionately work on the game long after its original creators had left Motion Twin.

To put it shortly, Evil Empire did a tremendous job at keeping the game fresh and alive, while taking great care of their players.

On the other side, I’ve seen first-hand how we, Motion Twin, considered our player base, years before Dead Cells even existed. Back when we were making dozens of Browser/Flash games. Our short term strategy was: release, update a bit, drop. It’s not some confidential information, it’s basically what our old player base, from the pre-Dead Cells era, know. I have obviously been part of that, but as a cooperative company, decisions were taken together, and I had my share of disillusion on that topic.

Obviously, when Dead Cells became the success we all know, MT decided to instantly ignore all of its past web-era player base. Fun fact, our former loyal players even waited more than 4 years and hundreds of requests to get the source code of long dead web games, mostly because MT didn’t care much. Thanks to their incredible love and dedication, some of our old creations were brought back to life (see Eternal Twin).

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The current Motion Twin team is more or less 3 people from the former Dead Cells team, including one employee that joined lately, and one who took care of the administrative stuff. Most of the true original team members are now gone. Even MT founders are long gone: one founded Shiro Games (Dune, Wartales, Northgard), one created Shotgun King, and me, well.. wait for it, cool things are in the making 🙂

To be honest, the only true Dead Cells team is now basically Evil Empire that managed to carry the flame for so long, with a true love for the franchise.

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I kind of understand the MT strategy: it’s a rather logical marketing stunt. Get rid of Dead Cells to leave room for Windblown. But as Motion Twin always did, it’s a one-way strategy that leaves people behind: both loyal players and employees at EE. Nothing really new, unfortunately.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.