We at Ars' gaming squad do our best to tread water amid a growing sea of impressive indie games, especially those made by upstart teams, and we were glad that we spied a tiny, inconspicuous booth for The Flock at this year's Game Developers Conference. The asymmetrical team shooter, made by a university development team in the Netherlands, pares down the bloated ambition of this year's Evolve in shining fashion. The Flock's creepy, tense battles force a single, flashlight-wielding human to face off against a few ravenous, stealthy monsters—who battle to themselves become the human and finish the level's objectives.

Good thing we caught this one early, as well, because The Flock won't last forever.

On Wednesday, the developer, Vogelsap, announced the game's August 21 launch date on Windows, along with a buy-one-get-one-free offer for all pre-orders deal, assumedly to help aspiring Flock players find friends to play with. The developer also told Ars exactly how long the game would last. After the game's servers register 215,358,979 in-game deaths, The Flock will shut down forever. No reboot, no restart, no stats-wipe, and no refunds.

This news follows a Eurogamer report from July that confirmed the interesting twist, which creative director Jeroen van Hasselt said was done in response to what the team had seen happen to other aging online shooters. "We want to tackle a problem with the anticlimactic ending of a multiplayer experience," van Hasselt said to Eurogamer. "We want the game to have a climactic finalé after which people will fondly remember the game, instead of it to slowly wither away."

"This is not about getting the best business deal"





Vogelsap

As a result, the game will not see any official continuation or "second season" reboot, and the developers have created a population FAQ to address the wide range of questions players may have as a result—including vague details about the aforementioned "finalé" event that will kick off once the lives count reaches a certainlow level. The devs have estimated roughly a year's worth of play time based on the number they reached, and they say the only exceptions to the life count being changed would be if data points to trolling players burning through lives through an exploit—at which point those lives will simply be restored—or if an Xbox One orPS4 version of the game ever launches, since those versions would share the same lives pool as the PC version. The FAQ mentions no provision in case the game proves wildly popular à la last month's indie smash Rocket League.

In terms of asking for people to pay for an unusually finite online-versus experience, Vogelsap noted that the game's horror atmosphere might burn out after a certain amount of time, and that public data points to indie multiplayer games typically struggling to maintain player populations. The cost for a potentially brief game will be offset to at least some extent by free DLC for the game's lifetime, but Vogelsap didn't elaborate on what form that DLC might take—other than the finale, at any rate.

"This is not about getting the best business deal," the FAQ concluded. "It’s about creating authenticity and exploring new ways for a game to deliver entertainment."

When asked pointedly about how the team got to the 215,338,979 number, van Hasselt again pointed Ars to that FAQ, which vaguely references data accumulated from the game's alpha and beta periods, along with future discount sales and trolling players. A quick stop at Wolfram Alpha didn't reveal any interesting formulas or pop-culture references (unless you're into its prime-number equation of 11×73×269×997).

Listing image by Vogelsap