Sketch Tales

Sketch Tales entered Steam Early Access on September 28, 2015 as an action-RPG sandbox where player drawings come to life. The developer, 8D Studio, was active through 2016 with multiplayer beta updates and feature patches, but on November 7, 2017, project lead Alexey Sityanov published a frank announcement: the game was being frozen due to exhausted funds and failed negotiations with publishers. The studio outlined plans to restart Sketch Tales as a free-to-play online game but acknowledged this was contingent on finding new funding and building a new team. Nearly seven years later, on July 27, 2024, the developer posted again — this time to open the old closed beta to anyone using a publicly shared access code. Crucially, that post explicitly stated: "Unfortunately, the game was frozen and it's an unfinished game." No new content was shipped; the post simply made the existing unfinished beta accessible to all owners. There has been no developer communication since July 27, 2024. The promised F2P restart has never materialized. The game remains available for purchase on Steam in its Early Access state, but all evidence points to development having stalled indefinitely. The store page still describes planned features (multiplayer, open world AI, cross-platform play) that were never completed, and the game has never reached a 1.0 release.