Posted by John Irwin on June 30, 2012

You know how it is when life gets in the way of a really good game? That’s how it has been for me and Work in Progress. So too for Parable and the team behind PubComp.

For those joining the story now, PubComp was an ambitious project to provide a platform for non-competitive and competitive players alike. It was to have been an enhanced version of TF2lobby, allowing players to jump from casual play directly into a highly configurable match at the drop of a hat.

The project was began in summer of 2011 and was supposed to have seen an alpha release later that year. But here we are, months later with everything seemingly forgot. It’s far from unusual to have ambitious projects scrapped mid flow but this one held such high promise and had drawn together some incredibly dedicated and driven people. The day of death is a hard one to pin down, even while the programming group where failing to meet deadlines the community group were supporting competitive collaborations across the world.

Most of the original staff are still playing and working in Team Fortress 2 related activities. Though reports of their demise have not been greatly exaggerated, it may be that the dream of PubComp lives on.

Update: PubComp is now dead – see my final interview with the dev team