Indie developer Dang is shutting down despite its first and only game, the rip-snorting boomerang FPS Boomerang X, getting pretty great reception across the board.
In a candid statement written in Notepad – because "none of us really wanted to make a professional-looking closure announcement" – and posted to Twitter, Dang confirms that it's "closing up shop."
"Unfortunately we were not able to find funding for our next game and we are out of money," the dev explains. "We're not writing off the possibility of working on some small stuff together in the future but for now we're all going our separate ways. Thanks to all the love you've shown to us over the years and thanks for playing Boomerang X."
In replies to worried fans, Dang confirmed that Boomerang X will remain on sale despite the studio's closure. The dev also explained that the team discussed crowdfunding routes like Kickstarter as one option, "but it's never quite made sense for our situation."
Boomerang X was Dang's debut game, released in July 2021, about three years after the studio's founding. On top of stellar Steam reception of 95% positive reviews, it fared quite well on aggregates like Metacritic, with review scores averaging in the 80s. If you're not convinced, you can sample its fiendishly clever take on the classic arena FPS for free via the Steam demo. The game is also available on Switch.
Dang does have a second game, the hacking sim IO Interloper, listed on Steam as "coming soon," but this is presumably the project that the studio couldn't find funding for. Sadly, we will likely never see the "hacking heist game all about peering through security cameras, piloting drones, duping rubes, and saying I'M IN in a really gruff voice."
This news comes at a rough time for the games industry altogether, with layoffs at Sega, Epic, Naughty Dog, and reportedly Blizzard and Ubisoft all cropping up around the same time, to say nothing of the Embracer bloodbath.
