As of today, we’re going to officially sunset Fangs to focus on our next title, “Project Soulforge”, which will be a spiritual successor to Fangs. It’s difficult to share this news as our team has poured our hearts and soul into the success of Fangs but we didn’t feel like we could reach our goals with the challenges that we faced with the original version of Fangs.

We appreciate all the support the community has provided in the development and launch of Fangs, we made amazing memories with you as we got our studio’s first title out the door. We can’t thank you enough and the feedback and passion you provided tremendously helped with the development of Fangs.

How did we get here?

When we launched Fangs almost exactly one year ago today, we were super excited to share our vision of the game to the world. During the first month of our Early Access launch, we saw players come and go but we were unable to retain enough players to maintain a healthy playerbase and keep matchmaking quality and queue times to an acceptable level.

Our team worked tirelessly to resolve all the issues we had at launch, but ultimately we decided to take the game down for an extended period of time to focus on some core issues to the code base and the core gameplay design of the game. This gave us more time to focus on solving some of the biggest pain points and really evaluate what we wanted Fangs to become.

After a long evaluation process, we realized that the work we were doing on Fangs was fundamentally changing the game and decided to spin it off into a new project, “Project Soulforge”.

Why shut down Fangs and launch a new game?

A few things pushed us to work on Project Soulforge instead of improving the original Fangs:

1. The bones of Fangs still exists within Project Soulforge, but the gameplay has vastly changed in a different direction, focusing more on Build Fantasy and Power Spikes
2. We’ve removed and updated numerous features that we felt were unnecessary in Fangs and added features to support the new gameplay in Project Soulforge

What exactly is Project Soulforge?

It’s still early but here’s what I can share. Project Soulforge is a game that I think truly delivers on what FANGS wanted to be.

• Augments will have more significant power spikes and combinations, the power fantasy of each Augment will be much more noticeable and the combination of Augments have the potential to be much spikier. We really want to chase the fun in Augments
• Strategic augment decisions will be much more clear and impactful
• Game objectives will remain a driving function of combat. PvP will always be a focus but interacting with game objectives will gain your team advantages. 
• Round to round diversity will introduce variance from match to match, as your team navigates the rounds and adjusts to the evolving gameplay conditions.

Be on the lookout in the next few weeks on how to get involved in playtesting Project Soulforge via our Discord & Twitter.

I spent money on Fangs, what now?

Thank you for supporting Fangs – we don’t want to leave you hanging, so for players that have purchased the Founder’s Pack and/or monetized in Fangs, you will be given a copy of Project Soulforge for free and your account will be granted an exclusive item to show your status as a early supporter.

Project Soulforge will not be Free to Play during its Early Access period. Hidden Leaf Games has been developing for over 4 years now without generating the necessary revenue needed to sustain the development. 

1. We want to keep our team focused on building content and updates to improve the game rather than introduce new skins or cosmetic upgrades that would take away from those resources. So instead of monetization on microtransactions, we’d instead like to monetize on what we want to focus on; the gameplay itself. 
2. A premium box price creates a more sustainable and reliable business model for a smaller studio like ours. Having an upfront premium cost associated with the product lets us focus on doing what we love, creating new engaging content for our players.

Fangs is done but the spirit of Fangs will live on

Finally, on behalf of the entire development team, we want to thank you for all the support, feedback and passionate discussion you have provided us over the years. We will continue building this new title with community feedback in mind  and look forward to y’all joining our upcoming playtest.

-Bao and David