You are probably reading this blog post hoping for news of new features, fixes and content updates to SNOW - unfortunately, that’s not what this particular post is about. As you may have noticed, we have been relatively quiet over the last 6 months - no blog posts, updates, and very little social media or Discord presence. This has been for many reasons, which I will attempt to explain as transparently as possible to bring you up to speed on where we are today and what the future holds for SNOW.

Since the initial free-to-play release of SNOW in 2015 we have struggled to reach profitability. The implementation of Ski Passes this past winter was our latest attempt to impact our revenue. We knew this move would be controversial, but also believed we needed to do something/anything to move the needle - even if it meant potentially angering our user base. Sadly, even this more drastic game update didn’t provide the changes we had hoped for, and instead just brought a wave of negative reviews on Steam. At this point we lost faith in our ability to find new ways to reach profitability and no longer had the confidence of our patient shareholders. We needed help, as we were quickly running out of money with no investments expected in the foreseeable future.

Thankfully we were able to find some consulting work to temporarily pay the bills, although this meant that our time was fully occupied and we had to stop working on SNOW. During this same time, we also began conversations with a larger game developer who showed interest in acquiring the company and team, and continuing development of SNOW. Unfortunately at the end of April, the deal fell through. This left us in a very bad position as our short-term consulting contract ended and we were not acquired as hoped. Therefore, for the first time, we were unable to pay any salaries and were forced to let go of our remaining employees. Furthermore, we needed to cut all non-essential costs (salaries, our office, SNOW multiplayer servers) in order to make sure the company would stay afloat, and the core game servers could continue running.

So, what does this mean for SNOW?

SNOW’s future is uncertain at the moment. Markus and I have spent the last 7 years working on this game and don’t want to see it die - but it will take some time to find SNOW a new home or devise a clever way to keep a version up and running. Some work has been made towards a future game update, including improvements to Tyro Valley and the Winter X Games 2018 level, but we won’t be able to release this until we have some technical support to finalize the build. We are currently investigating all of our options, and talking with other game developers and publishers about various paths forward.

So that’s where we are today. Markus and I are still around and will be spending the summer continuing to look for a way to save the game and everything we have built.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. We started this company knowing that the road to success would not be easy and we would not have gotten this far without the amazing support and dedication of our community - people like you. So, thank you, we are eternally grateful.