Where are they now?
Blast Zone! Tournament News — January 9, 2020
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Hey everyone,
In February 2017, Mike and I were elated to have the opportunity to start working on Bomb Buddies aka Blast Zone again! Our team that peaked at 4 people, and we did our best to modernize and improve the game. We added the party system, a massive single-player game mode, new auto-matching, 32 player mode, ... with the hopes of attracting both our loyal fan base as well as new players to the game.
And when Early Access began, many of our loyal player base returned! And, the feedback we received on the game was priceless. With your help, we made a myriad of improvements and fixed countless bugs. Thank you!
In Early Access, we coordinated with Valve to offer the game for free for a brief period of time. The goals were to make the game more fun for existing players, raise awareness of the game, and to establish a stable multiplayer player base that we'd be able to grow as we fixed, improved, and updated the game. Within days, Blast Zone! Tournament was added to over 1.3 million players' Steam accounts! And, we were excited - more and more players were entering into the game. We got lots of helpful feedback which we used to make more improvements to the game.
Mike and I spent 2 years to release BZT on PC, PS4, and Xbox 1. And, with all versions released, we feel our mission here is nearing completion. Keith Kawahata, the Head of Mobile for Wargaming, made us an offer to buy the source code for Blast Zone! Tournament and give us great roles at their Berlin, Germany development studio. Note: the new games have nothing gameplay-wise or theme-wise in common with BZT, yet we had built a very solid multi-platform Unity code base that is being reused.
In June 2019, we moved to Berlin and started our jobs at Wargaming. Blast Zone! Tournament's servers are still on. We'll keep them on until the ongoing server costs exceed the game's income to an unmanageable degree. NOTE: As of November 2019, the game is beginning to lose money each month.
Thank you for your support. We hope Blast Zone! Tournament brings you joy! We loved working on it and being apart of the community.
--Chris & Mike