Two years after its launch, light-and-dark-based online shooter Blindfire failed to reach its business goals. Nowadays, most devs would’ve folded—long before the two-year mark, even—but Double Eleven decided to be awesome and make the game free instead.
Blindfire never reached much of a player base and had its last update one year ago. With the devs also stating they were no longer actively working on the game, many believed they wouldn’t see any more good news from Blindfire. Then, it turned out a revamped version of the game was right around the corner, with new weapons, skins, and achievements, and completely for free. Why? Well, Double Eleven gave just the best possible answer for their reasoning
“We are doing this because we believe games are art and they deserve to be preserved.”
And they’re right. All games deserve this treatment, whether or not you’re going to play them or learn something from them. Blindfire has a really cool concept that shouldn’t be forgotten, with players competing in nearly pitch-dark areas where they have to use their special equipment and scarce light sources to see and shoot their enemies before they themselves get lit up, both literally and figuratively.
This new version also adds awesome accessibility options, such as audio-assisted aim, which many blind and partially-sighted players had asked for because they’d told the devs this was one of the few games they could actually be competitive in. So, if you’re looking for a game by developers who really do listen to the players, this might be it.
Though Blindfire’s concept might not prove for everyone’s taste, it likely wasn’t the reason for Blindfire 1.0’s lack of success. And neither was getting into the whole light/dark thing before the French made it cool. I’m betting that a large part of the problem was the fact that a lot of people were just reading about the game for the first time.
Sad, but that failure didn’t spell certain death and has been reworked into something that may yet catch players’ attention. Should this revival prove fruitful in any way, it might influence more publishers to try bolder options when dealing with games that don’t achieve Fortnite numbers out of the blue—because many seem to forget that not even Fortnite did that upon release.
Blindfire‘s new version, Blindfire: Lights Out, is now live and free for everyone to play on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
