OtherSide Entertainment’s stealth game Thick As Thieves launched in May of this year, but felt like it should have been in early access. It only had two maps, and though its campaign changed the objectives as it bounced you back and forth between them in either co-op or solo play, it felt thin. Frustrations like the specifics of how its time-limit system worked and the absence of options like rebindable keys at launch didn’t help.
While the first post-launch content update did give us rebindable keys at least, it wasn’t enough to fully turn around the fortunes of Thick as Thieves. Which was a problem, because the other game OtherSide was working on was cancelled, and now it’s had two rounds of layoffs leaving fewer than 10 employees remaining.
“Working in the gaming industry is at times delightful and at other times heartbreaking”, says a message posted by game director Jeff Hickman, and ain’t that the truth. Hickman goes on to confirm that “only a very small team remains” and therefore Thick as Thieves won’t be receiving any further content updates. “To be frank,” he writes, “this is not the outcome that any of us want, but we’re facing the reality that ongoing development of extra content, modes and systems is not a viable path.”
However, OtherSide and publisher Megabit are working together to ensure Thick as Thieves remains playable. “This mainly involves putting together a new version of the game that uses Peer to Peer servers for co-op play”, Hickman continues. “The gameplay and flow of your experience will remain virtually identical, but will not need the use of dedicated servers in the cloud. This will allow you to continue playing with your friends when you desire and importantly, solo play will be completely unaffected. Once this work is complete, Megabit will take over the care of the game and respond to bugs and other issues as needed.”
With hindsight, I wonder how much launching at a price of only $5 hurt Thick as Thieves. It created an impression of desperation and cheapness that even a slightly higher price would have mitigated, and the idea that it was thrown out half-baked as a fundraiser rather than being a game worth buying on its own merits dogged it from the moment of release.
But it’s entirely likely that Thick as Thieves was a game that would always have a small audience no matter what its price tag, and whether or not it had stuck to its guns and stayed the PvPvE game it was initially billed as.
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