Devs make Planet Explorers free after accidentally deleting all multiplayer code

Pathea Games’ open world sandbox RPG Planet Explorers has been made completely free after its multiplayer code was accidentally deleted.

The far-future exploration game did see mild success, although it only had an all-time peak of 2,107 concurrent players. In the game, players can find quest givers, fight monsters and drive around in cars. It looks fairly generic, but I imagine many had fun with it.

However, with the game being made free, many might have the chance to jump in. Unfortunately, it’s now without one of its key selling points: multiplayer.

In a blog post on Steam, Panthea explained that they experienced an issue where all of the multiplayer code base got deleted from its server. After spending a month investigating the issue, the developer came to the conclusion that the only way to fix the issue was to rewrite the code from scratch. They will not be doing that.

“We’ve arrived at the unfortunate conclusion that it’s a lost cause unless we completely rewrite the code from scratch,” the devs wrote. “We used a software called U-link for PE, and that software is now defunct. Even if we had the original U-link code, we still don’t have the configurations and additional code we wrote back in 2013. Under the circumstances, we just don’t have the resources to rewrite the multiplayer code for PE. We’re truly sorry for this.”

Without multiplayer working, the Planet Explorers team believes the game isn’t a complete package, As such, the game will be completely free on Steam and the game’s source code will be released to the public.

As the team continues work on Planet Explorers 2, that game will have a playable alpha branch for all players of the original game in the future.

Some Steam players are not happy at the situation. “Paid money for this during EA, then they deleted the multiplayer code and as a bonus thank you made the game free to play,” said one player. “Sure as hell won’t support them in the future.”