The massively multiplayer online game Shadowbane has a new lease on life, thanks to a deal announced today between game publisher Ubi Soft Entertainment and Shadowbane developer Wolfpack Studios. Ubi Soft today announced that it would publish Shadowbane after Wolfpack finishes the game up, sometime in the first half of next year.
Shadowbane is a massively multiplayer online game which takes place in a persistent universe. Combining both role-playing and strategy elements, Shadowbane is set in a medieval land in which players can affect the history, politics, and landscape of the game world. It’s up to you to build castles, raise armies, and lay siege in Shadowbane, working with or against thousands of other players in a virtual world.
The Mac community has had its eye on Shadowbane since the game’s public debut last year. Wolfpack, a Mac-friendly developer, has long had plans to make Shadowbane for both PC and Mac — in fact, the company’s first demonstration of the Shadowbane technology to MacCentral was done using a PowerBook G3. Wolfpack’s plans took a detour earlier this year when publisher Gathering of Developers, a subsidiary of Take Two Interactive Software, dropped the game from their roster. (In the intervening months, Take Two has also struck a deal with Infogrames to license its stable of Mac titles, resulting in a windfall of new A-list “hardcore” games from Infogrames subsidiary MacSoft.)
Ubi Soft has big plans for the game. The company said that it expects to attract several hundred thousand players in the first two years of operations, generating in excess of 40 million dollars. Fortunately for developer Wolfpack, Ubi Soft has agreed to handle all back-end support for the game, including network and server infrastructure, billing, customer service and in-game support. Wolfpack will focus its resources on continuing to update the game and producing episodic content to keep Shadowbane players interested.
More details about the deal and the game itself are available on the Shadowbane Web site.