Indie studio pulls its first game from Steam after realizing it lost the source code: 'We had no established routine to back up our data'

Last week, a news post appeared on the Steam page for Quantum Lock, an asymmetrical game of cyberspace freeze tag from 2015 and the first game released by indie developer Fat Bomb Studios. The news was grim: While Quantum Lock had been "a big milestone," the studio said it "was created at a time before we understood version control software." Fat Bomb was delisting Quantum Lock because, in the years since its release, the source code had been lost.

Without the source code, any issues, bugs, or—worst of all—potential security vulnerabilities players might discover in Quantum Lock can't be addressed. "We do not have access to the source code anymore and cannot make any fixes or changes to the game," Fat Bomb said in the shutdown announcement. "Because of this, we have decided to disable the ability for anyone to buy copies of the game."

Aaron Leaton, cofounder of Fat Bomb Studios, had been seeking inspiration when he returned to his studio's first game after eight years away. 

"The game garnered a peak of 10 concurrent users, which was most likely friends of mine that I had convinced to test our game," Leaton said in an email to PC Gamer. "We had fixed all of the issues we ran into and had no external bug reports. So we moved on from the game and didn't look back until this month, when I had opened it to gather some art reference for a possible new map in our new game, Light Bearers 2."

Returning with eight more years of game development under his belt, Leaton said he discovered "so many issues that are glaring to me now." The problem? He couldn't fix them. "At the time of Quantum Lock’s development, we had no established routine to back up our data, aside from placing stuff onto a portable hard drive," Leaton said. In the years since Quantum Lock's release, that portable hard drive was lost. Leaton's explanation was frank: "We lacked both the knowledge and resources to be able to house data on a local server or a cloud."

Today, Fat Bomb's version control solution has evolved to include a local Perforce server and additional backups in two separate locations. Leaton called the loss of Quantum Lock a casualty of "the paradox of not knowing what we don't know."

With Quantum Lock left permanently unfixable, Leaton made the reasonable call of delisting it on Steam to keep people from purchasing a compromised product. "I did not want to have any players from our other games stray onto it and be met with disappointment," Leaton said. 

Evidently, this earned some frustration from self-described "dedicated collectors," who were dismayed by a Steam game they couldn't add to their libraries, even if hardly anyone had been interested in it previously. "I had not expected any reaction whatsoever from the closure," Leaton said.

Asked whether he had any advice for other indie devs about to release their first games, Leaton said it was a tricky question, saying today's game dev landscape has so many available resources to pull from that it "would be unrecognizable" to the version of himself that was developing Quantum Lock in 2015. To Leaton, the most important thing is experience. 

"Your first game is most likely going to flop," Leaton said. "No one is good at anything in the beginning, save for savants. Game development is a skill that has to be developed over time, through a healthy dose of failure."

The second most important thing? "Use Google Drive for your backups," Leaton said.

Fat Bomb's next asymmetrical multiplayer game, Light Bearers 2, is due to release in late 2024.