One of 2023’s biggest indie games and viral hits, Only Up, has been pulled fromSteamby its creator, who said that they wanted to “put the game behind” them due to all of the stress it has caused.
With games like Starfield, Mortal Kombat 1, Spider-Man 2, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and more, 2023 has unarguably been one of the biggest years for gaming ever. That’s just thinking about the big triple-A games too, as there have been a ton of indie titles to contend with too. One of the biggest indie games is (well,was) a platforming game called Only Up, which tasked players with platforming their way up a huge tower and trying not to fall down.
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The simple, potentially rage-inducing premise of Only Up made it a popular game with streamers, with a reported 280,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch and 9,000 concurrent players during the height of the game’s popularity. That massive success for such a small title should be a happy story for solo developer SCKR Games, but it looks like it’s been a bit of a headache for them,as they’ve decided to remove the game from Steamdue to the “stress” that it was causing them.
As reported by PCGamesN, SCKR Games posted an update on the game’s Steam page which explained that Only Up was going to be removed from sale on the Steam store because they want to put the game behind them and move on from it to another project. They also state that Only Up caused them “a lot of stress” since it released, possibly due to the massive amount of attention that it got.
The statement reads, “I’m a solo developer and this game is my first experience in Gamedev, a game I did for creativity, to test myself, and where I made a lot of mistakes. The game has kept me under a lot of stress all these months. Now I want to put the game behind me. And yes. The game won’t be available in the steam store soon, that’s what I decided myself”.
Although that might be it for Only Up for the foreseeable future, SCKR Games does reveal that they’re working on a new game called Kith, which they describe as a “new experience” with a focus on realism and cinematography. Considering how much stress Only Up gave them, I hope that this next project is a more peaceful one for them, which seems likely as they also confirmed that they want to make the game with a small team this time around.
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