As much as I loved playing through Image & Form’s Steamworld Dig I always felt it had more potential, interestingly the developers actually wanted to do more with the game however financial restraints didn’t permit. The original plan would have had Steamworld Dig launch with a few more worlds, however as we know Image & Form shelved them. Speaking with Shigeru News the studio provided a full explanation for the unfortunate decision.
Image & Form stated:
Yes, towards the end of the production we came under some pretty severe financial constraints – we were quickly going broke. Anthill wasn’t making much money for us anymore, and we had to be done with Dig by the end of June 2013; we would have run out of money if we had continued over summer. In Sweden, summer works like this: *everyone* goes on vacation in July, and we had to send the game for a time-consuming lotcheck process. The most economic way to do it was to let vacation and lotcheck coincide – and then pray that the game would sail smoothly through inspection.
It did, but that also meant that we had to race to finish the game by the end of June. And there were a couple of worlds that we didn’t have time to finish. It was sad in every way, but we couldn’t have finished it otherwise – we would have gone bust. In retrospect we may have benefited from including them, but we had no idea whether the game would be successful or not. It would have been ballsy to include the extra content and hoped for the best, but at the same time it would have been reckless beyond description. A lot of us have families, and it would have been harsh.
The latest entry in the Steamworld Dig franchise Steamworld Heist is set to arrive later this year. Keep an eye out for it on a multitude of platforms when it arrives
