Elastic Games has an amazing story to share about their journey to bring their hit passion project, multi-player horror game Last Year, back to life.
This is an inspiring story that needs to be shared. Their story is one of a small indie studio with a big game, a seemingly successful launch, and the rapid growth of a massive community around it almost overnight. It’s also the story of the dire consequences of losing a storefront and publisher, and the pain of letting their fans down. But this is a comeback story where commitment to the fans pushes an indie studio to change their business model, and pour everything into a game relaunch. And the moral of this story is to stay true to your community.
Elastic Games is a passionate 20-person indie team based in Montreal, Canada. While small in size their diverse team includes industry veterans from much bigger players like WB and Ubisoft. They’ve used that experience and passion in creating a truly unique survival horror experience called Last Year. A 6-player match game, where 5 players work together as a Team of Classmates trying to escape and survive the night, vs the 6th player who is the Fiend, hunting the others down, and murdering each in the most gruesome ways possible. They launched the prologue Chapter, Last Year: The Nightmare, at the end of 2018 exclusively on Discord’s new app store that was designed to compete with the likes of Steam.
They immediately found a massive community ready for such an innovative offering. But within months, Discord unexpectedly shut down their storefront and Elastic lost their only platform and publisher. They now had angry fans who wanted their game back, and no way to get it to them. Without a storefront, they couldn’t do something as basic to business as sell their product. Most small companies wouldn’t survive this scenario. The easy answer would be to port the game to Steam but they knew that was a disservice to the community. The players wanted real change. So, they put their heads down and pushed through the darkness. They poured in their blood, sweat, and tears all over again but this time they had the feedback the community had given them.
Using that feedback and learning from their mistakes they spent the last 12 months building an amazing new chapter to be launched on Steam on December 11th, 2019. The incredible community around Last Year has been the engaging force that Elastic Games needed to keep going in 2019, even when everything seemed to be falling apart. As a special thank you to that community who supported them and purchased Last Year: The Nightmare, Elastic is gifting them all with a free copy of the game on Steam, which includes a brand new expansion, Chapter 1: Afterdark!
