Board Thread:Announcements/@comment-16922870-20170304215241/@comment-30202282-20170322012856

I want this site to stay together just because it's the closest thing the GOF fandom has to a proper community.

It's a community of six people, but yeah.

Oh, and Niveliking, you're exactly right. But I wanna clear up a little misconception here - Everspace isn't made by FISHLABS. It's made by Rockfish Games.

There's a little bit of a story here. I'm not privy to all the details, but this is what I've been able to piece together.

Fishlabs proper went into financial trouble shortly after GOF2's release on Android, and was forced to lay off several developers. After they were bought out by Deep Silver, it became clear to most of Old Fishlabs - Michael Schade and all the other devs we know and love from the golden days - that the company was headed in a direction they didn't like. They were involved in the very early development of GOF3 - I actually have a screenshot somewhere of a piece of concept art used on a banner back in 2013 showing off what later became the Atauno Rheep.

Anyway, they became dissatisfied with the new direction, and left to go make their own game studio. This is Rockfish Games. Since they were the original GOF team, they wanted to do something similar - and as their first project they made the marvelous Everspace. I suspect there was some legal drama here - partly because of the presence of Thermoguns in Everspace and their conspicuous absence in GOF3.

Everspace's developers are super active on the game's subreddit, and they've been asked a few times about their involvement in GOF3 - which they politely answer that they had very little influence on its final result. When asked aobut bringing Everspace to mobile? They say there's not a chance. They refuse to use iAPs in any way, and they believe it is impossible to succeed on mobile without them (despite numerous modern examples of successful premium games).

Basically, besides good ol' Tobi, very few of the original GOF2 team are behind GOF3, which serves to explain pretty well the wild disparity in scope and aesthetic design between the two.