Another eternal early access? After 5 months, Steam stops selling the failed Cold War shooter

This year, '83 by Blue Dot Games was released on PC via Steam. It's a tactical online shooter set in the Cold War, with battles intended to unfold in a '40 vs 40' format:

'83 continues the traditions of the Rising Storm series, a game in the accessible realism genre. Members of our team have worked on all previous Rising Storm titles, as well as the Red Orchestra series. Some of us have been working in this genre for fifteen years.

However, the game did not become a big hit. '83 has a record online peak on Steam of 813 players, and recently the peak has been within a few dozen players.

In late September, Blue Dot Games announced that it was suspending sales of '83. The developers admit that they might bring the shooter back to sale in the future if they manage to attract investors willing to support further development:

We had hoped that the first major content update, combined with a discount, a free demo, and excellent coverage at the FPS Games Show, would breathe new life into the game, but unfortunately, this did not happen. Our CCU (concurrent players) metric was significantly below the level required to maintain investor confidence in the project's future and support us on the path to version 1.0. Therefore, the current commercial reality is that we are forced to suspend sales of the game while we look for other options. The game will still be available, the servers will remain operational, but we cannot, in good conscience, continue to sell the game while its future is so uncertain.

The '83 page on Steam is available at the following link. At the time of publication, the game had not been removed from sale.

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