Reloaded Games has acquired Hawken
Free-to-play mech game joins APB: Reloaded after months of silence
The free-to-play PC shooter Hawken has been rescued from a period of apparent stasis by Reloaded Games, the publisher of APB: Reloaded.
Reloaded has acquired Hawken from its original publisher, Meteor Entertainment, which ran into trouble almost exactly a year ago. According to a report from Geekwire at that time, the company closed its Seattle office and consolidated operations in its Los Angeles studio.
Meteor's Twitter account went silent in May 2013, and its Facebook page hasn't been updated since August of the same year. In both cases, the final post invited people to apply for open positions at the studio. Meteor Entertainment's website is also offline.
The Facebook page for Hawken was regularly updated until July last year, at which point it went quiet until Friday March 13, 2015, when a post saying simply, "Rumbles," alerted the game's fanbase to some impending, and long overdue, activity.
On Saturday, another post listed a number of updates the game would soon receive, the first in quite some time. Later that day, it was confirmed that Reloaded is the new owner of the game, with more information on the deal promised as soon as the official forums are back online.
Adhesive Games' Hawken first emerged in March 2011, when its mix of cutting-edge visuals and mech-based combat immediately caused a stir among core PC gamers. Meteor agreed to publish the game in November of that year. By the same point in 2012, it had raised a total of $28 million in funding from two separate rounds - one in February, the other in October. It entered open beta in December, 2012, receiving a handful of good reviews in the following months.
From there, Meteor seemed content to rely on word-of-mouth and a handful of big-name partnerships to build anticipation around the game while Adhesive continued development. Hawken was released on Steam in February, 2014.