Sweet Bandits Studios shut down in December 2024, and its spy-versus-spy shooter Deceive Inc was expected to fade out quietly in maintenance mode. Instead, the game is being rebuilt so the community can run it forever.

The Announcement

In a Steam post titled The Future of Deceive Inc., the team says the game's backend is being rebuilt to be sustainable long-term and to support community-hosted dedicated servers. The update brings a dedicated server application, an in-game server browser, cross-platform server joining, and it preserves account progression and unlocks through the migration. A public Steam beta is expected in about a month, and a small number of official servers will stay online. PC Gamer reports that publisher Tripwire Interactive is providing the backend support to make it happen.

We don't believe Deceive Inc. should quietly disappear because the services behind it aren't sustainable forever.

No modding toolkit is promised, but the team says it wants to remove the technical barriers that stop the community from modding the game itself.

Why It Matters

Deceive Inc launched in March 2023 and sits at a Very Positive rating from roughly 4,500 Steam reviews, but an 18-person studio could not keep a live-service PvP game afloat. Sweet Bandits hit what it called its breaking point at the end of 2024. The default ending for games like this is a shutdown notice and a store page selling a product that no longer works.

This is the other ending, and it should be the standard one. In a year when players are petitioning regulators to stop publishers from killing games, a closed studio and its publisher have shown the bar is not that high: ship a server binary and a browser, then get out of the community's way. More of this, please.