As promised, here’s a succinct update about what’s going on First para is the backstory.

Our studio launched in the good old year of 2004. A year later, Age of Empires 3 was released and we slowly started transitioning to it. Sadly, by late 2006, it was becoming clear that the design community with this game wasn’t really taking off. Age of Mythology design was also going through a weird period as people were unsure whether to move on or not. To add to that, my own free time was becoming sparse and I became incapable of leading the team effectively. We decided to try to pass on leadership roles to other members, but this failed quickly and by mid 2007, LFS became a desolate team…

We never did officially close though, and two years later the studio has suddenly popped back into the spotlight with Age of Star Wars and Legends of Middle Earth.

The story is very simple really - we have two unreleased projects. A handful of designers have been working on them all this time, and they’re both coming close to release. I was also offered this .com domain. And lastly, it’s summer time a.k.a free time What better time to get the ball rolling? We will release AoSW, then launch the new site design and perhaps some time next year or even sooner, LoME will be released!

That is the plan. Sadly, the plan does not extend beyond that. This September I start uni and to be honest with myself, between full on studying and violating my body I don’t think there will be time to manage a studio. Besides that, I believe the time of design teams has ended (or at least design teams in their current form). I’ve watched the community in the past year evolve to a point where one guy can start a thread and a handful of designers will come to aid. Ironically, this is one of the ideals that I tried to work this studio towards.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t carry out that ideal now. And for that very reason (among others that I’ll explain now), Liquid Fire Studios will remain indefinitely open. It’s not too hard to understand that – I opened this studio when I was 14. That means that I grew up with it. That’s right, I have an emotional attachment to this thing! The other side to this is that: LFS has released a lot of great works and built up a reputation. If you add up the downloads from all our projects, the combined total downloads is 30-40 thousands!  Which means any other projects released under the studio will automatically get more attention from downloaders because they associate the name with good projects. We can also carry this reputation on to future games if the players also move on to these games.

That’s it It turned out to be a small essay of 475 words, but is as to the point as possible. Thanks for all your support up to this point, and all that you give in the future.