Congratulations, Landfall.

[Kay]

Well, Landfall, you've achieved something incredible. In the span of a few months, you've not only decided to abandon development on your most popular (and profitable, might I add) game, but now you've released a brand new title that wouldn't feel out of place on the Google Play store alongside all the other terrible ripoff games. I'm truly amazed that you've managed to go from the "underdog small dev team" that I've been rooting for since I was 13 to just another cash-grabbing studio willing to ride their one success until they fade into obscurity. Good job.

I could just leave it at that, but I feel that this game is enough of a personal insult to everyone that so much as looked at it that I should keep going.

First off: This is Lethal Company: LOL XD Edition. Anyone who says otherwise is either a dedicated fan of Landfall who can't take off the nostalgia goggles (like I used to be) or thinks the word "inspiration" means "fundamentally the same thing." The premise is identical, the mechanics are altered just enough to avoid copyright, and the added features are window dressing. Of course, anyone with a functioning frontal cortex can look at the timing of when this game was released and understand it, but then again that kind of person rarely bothers to reply to a steam discussion board. The only reason I'm posting one at all is that I can't be bothered to buy and immediately refund this game just to leave a review. Getting back to my point, this game is a blatant attempt to ride the coattails of a game that became massively popular on YouTube in just the same way that TABS and Stick Fight did for Landfall once upon a time. Back then, goofy physics and funny portmanteaus made them the kings of the algorithm. But nowadays, there are other hats in the ring. New small teams or independent developers making their passion projects go viral. And apparently, Landfall wanted in on that action again.

Unfortunately, they seem to have thought that this time they didn't have to try. "Just slap some UwU faces and streamer humor onto a formula that already works and we're golden!" Like that was all they needed. Never mind that the game lacks all the charm of that formula, both by virtue of the unoriginality and the fact that it took more developers to make a worse product. Forget the fact that the content creator """""humor""""" feels like it was taken out of The Quarry or a 1990s corporate anti-smoking cartoon. Gloss over the multitude of bugs that made the game literally unplayable before and currently, and made a product that was literally free not worth the money. Ignore the horrendous audio mixing, or the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ monster design, or the ugly art style that is much less forgivable than Lethal Company for the same reasons as above. Make it silly and goofy and add an (admittedly well-done and entertaining) video camera feature and it'll be a hit.

Well, here you are, Landfall. You got your fifteen minutes of fame. You got your initial rounds of Big Boy YouTubers to play your game. You got the big collection of your fans to pre-order it because it was free. You got your "we gotta release a game every April 1st because meme" quota done. And what you ended up with was a bunch of satirical video titles, a lovely collection of positive reviews warping your rating that say ♥♥♥♥ like "lel i died good game uwu," and basically no money since all the people who would actually buy the game already have it. Congrats.

(Also, side note, remember that one time when you ALSO released a big meme thing on April 1st, only it was for a game that already functioned and you gave people the option to give money to charity? Remember how well that worked? If you were gonna throw money away you might as well have thrown it at charity. Then you'd still have a little bit of my respect left.)

And you know what else you have? A longtime fan who was genuinely looking forward to playing HASTE who now can't bring himself to do so. Maybe if you had given this game the development time it needed instead of rushing to meet your meme-o'clock release date, this could've been something special. Or maybe - and I know this is shocking but bear with me - you could've stuck to the original stuff you already had been teasing? Just a suggestion.

I'm now starting to transition from being angry to being sad, so I'll leave it there. I'm excited to see how many people will read the first sentence of this and then give me a Jester steam award. Because an animated clown emoji will really hurt my feelings. Feel free to do so actually, it'll cheer me up.

[Salmanrush]

it was free why are you complaining

[Trench]

Is it ok if I just like the game?

[サムライウルフ産業]

Bait post go crazy.

[Botten Hanna]

Hi, I will try to meet your points here and then close this thread since I unfortunately think you’ll get a lot of pushback from the community. You can reach me personally at [e-mail] if you want to discuss anything in my reply to you.

First of all, I am saddened to hear that we have disappointed a long-time community member. I will try my best to explain our thinking and reply to your thread here.

With “decided to abandon development on your most popular (and profitable, might I add) game” I assume you mean Totally Accurate Battle Simulator?

We announced that the game wouldn’t get any more updates after the ones planned in the roadmap all the way back in 2022 - you can read that post here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/508440/view/4712459761453725298?l=english

The main reason TABS won’t be receiving more updates is the fact that the code base is very old and muddled due to its age, integrations and having to maintain many different platforms. This makes the game extremely hard to work in and the designers can spend a day trying to just open the Unity project. Due to the old code-base and how the game is built, any changes or additions can create more issues which can take months to fix and leaving the game in a broken state isn’t something we want to do.

We have also been working on TABS for 8 years this year we have always been open with the fact that we won’t work on just one game forever. TABS is in no way abandoned as we’re doing bug fixes and quality-of-life updates to ensure TABS’s future. We are not a games as a service company and TABS has received updates for 5 years after its early access release.

As you say you have been a community member for a long time, then you would know about our yearly tradition of April Fools games where we take a popular game genre and make something with our own spin on it. It shouldn’t surprise you that this year's edition took inspiration from amazing games like Lethal Company. As you mention yourself, you haven’t played the game so we understand if you don’t understand the differences between them. We have never claimed not to be inspired by Lethal Company - but the inspiration lies more in the phenomenon of games like Lethal Company and the streaming/video culture surrounding them which we wanted to parody. Both games end up having different purposes and mechanics with the video mechanic in CW being the very core of the game. At the end of the day, CW has brought a lot of joy to its players, including Lethal Company Dev Zeekerss themselves: https://x.com/ZeekerssRBLX/status/1775064602944160174 and that’s all we can really ask for.

Re charity: Most years like this year we’ve given the April Fool’s game away for free for a day or two before going paid or staying free - with for example TABG and Knightfall both going paid after the free period. The reason these games go paid after the free period is to pay for servers and compensate the devs working on the projects which is also the case this year. In 2020 however, the April Fool’s release was a Bug DLC for TABS where we turned the formula around where anyone who got it on the first day paid - with the proceeds going to charity and the DLC going free right after. We do it differently every year depending on the project, development costs and purpose.

As for “the original stuff you’ve already been teasing” we are still working on that game! :) HASTE: Broken World can be found here and is still being worked on by a bigger team: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1796470/HASTE_Broken_Worlds

I hope this explains the situation a bit more, and like I said you’re welcome to reach out to me by email if you have any further questions or concerns.