Hi everyone,
Firstly, thank you for your support on Stranded Deep 2. The response to the reveal has been amazing. It’s also great to see lots of new players jumping into Stranded Deep this weekend.
As development on SD2 picks up, some of you have asked about the state of the first game. I’d like to address those questions clearly here.
Development on Stranded Deep is finished. Version 1.0 was released in August 2022, followed by four patches. The final patch was released in January 2024. No more updates are planned. The game remains on sale, and multiplayer services will stay online.
Stranded Deep 1 is a Beam Team Games project. Stranded Deep 2 is being made by North Beach Games, where I’ve joined as Creative Director. I want to explain how the first game reached its final state, and why the situation is very different for SD2.
How Stranded Deep was made
When we first released Stranded Deep in 2015 it became wildly popular, far bigger than we ever expected. This put us next to games made by much bigger teams. But Stranded Deep was made by two people - my co-founder Ben and me. We worked with outside teams to bring the game to consoles and add multiplayer, but this brought its own issues that fell to us to fix after those teams moved on.
Ben left the project on good terms in 2022. The workload had been intense and sustained for years, and we basically didn’t have lives outside of working on SD. From then on, it was just me. Over 11 years of development, I pushed past my limits many times. By the end I was exhausted. I didn’t know what the future of Beam Team Games would look like. I didn’t know if the studio would continue at all. But after everything we had put into the game, I couldn’t walk away and leave it unfinished.
Most of the remaining bugs were related to multiplayer. Progress on fixing them had stalled, so I made the call to part ways with our multiplayer partner. Because the future of the studio was uncertain, I didn’t want to expand the team just to let them go when we were finished a few months later. Instead, I found a co-dev studio and planned to spend the next 6 months tidying everything up. We spent the next 18 months fixing the highest priority bugs to get the game to a place I could reasonably wrap it up.
Not every issue was fixed, and the final state of the game may not be good enough for everyone. I accept that. What I can say is that I gave everything I had to deliver as much as I could for you.
Why SD2 is different
Those years taught me a lot about what not to do. When NBG approached me about making SD2, I knew we needed a much bigger team and a different way of working. Here’s what we’re doing, based on those lessons:
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A full team. We’ve built a dedicated studio in Prague for SD2 with a much larger, highly talented team. It’s no longer two people carrying everything.
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Key features built in-house. Features like multiplayer are made by the same team that makes the game. The people who build it are the people who support it.
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Co-op from day one. Co-op is being designed into every feature from the start, not bolted on later.
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Built to grow. SD2 has been designed from the ground up to be updated regularly with new content.
Stranded Deep has been a huge part of my life, and so have all of you. Thank you for every hour you’ve spent with us, and for still being here. I hope you’ll join us for what comes next.
Stay Alive.
Sam.