Helsinki-based game studio Frozenbyte Inc is one of the good ones. After releasing Trine 2, the successor to its popular 2009 side-scrolling adventure game, the studio ported the original to the new engine and added support for online multiplayer—for free. Anyone who owned the original Trine received the updated Trine: Enchanted Edition upgrade at no cost. The studio also gave a free upgrade to Trine 2: Complete Story Edition for players who owned the Goblin Menace expansion campaign.

So like I said, one of the good ones.

Unfortunately, many players seem to have taken the “but what have you done for us lately” approach to Frozenbyte thanks to the somewhat lackluster release of the most recent game in the series, Trine 3: Artifacts of Power, and the studio is taking it kind of hard.

“Right off the bat I will say that we are proud of the game and what we have achieved overall,” Frozenbyte VP Joel Kinnunen said in an update to the Trine 3 Steam page. “We think it’s a fun game and we don’t think it’s too expensive either considering all the elements we have been able to put into the game.”

He continued, “However, our view is perhaps skewed, and we are now realizing that we have been looking at this perhaps from a different perspective and that many players do not accept that. We still think the game is good but the cliffhanger story and the relative shortness of the game are valid criticisms but ones which we didn’t realize would cause a disappointment in this scale. Sorry!”

Trine 3 is currently on sale for $19.79 on Steam, roughly one-third the price of most triple-A new releases, but some players have complained that the price is still too steep for the relatively short run time of the game. According to Frozenbyte, the development costs of Trine 3 were nearly triple that of Trine 2 at over $5.4 million.

“We have squeezed everything we could into the game, there’s nothing left on the table,” Kinnunen said. “We initially had a much longer story written and more levels planned, but to create what we envisioned, it would have taken at least triple the money, probably up to 15 million USD, which we didn’t realize until too late, and which we didn’t have.”

Kinnunen explained that the studio did not intentionally make the game short so that it could make more money off expansions, which is one accusation made by some players. Despite being satisfied with the outcome of the game itself, Kinnunen says the Trine series may not continue.

“The future of the series is now in question,” he said, “as the feedback, user reviews and poor media attention has caught us by surprise. … Right now we need a breather to bounce back from all this.”

Image courtesy of Frozenbyte