Island Sanctuary is being discontinued?

[Iscah]

Sad, because they could’ve really made some quality content if they continued developing it. But then, it’s not like they don’t have a track record for this sort of thing, so it’s not exactly surprising

What quality content?

They've "updated" it twice now and added nothing to the core gameplay.

First stage: Go out into the wilds, bang on rocks to get materials, come back and talk to the mammet to construct a long list of arbitrary items you don't get to keep or use, so one has no practical difference to any other. Interact with your 20 animals and 20 vegetables daily.

Second stage: Build a better tool so you can go out and bang on the same rocks and get new materials from them. Return to the mammet to construct a wider assortment of intangible items you don't get to keep. Interact with your 20 animals and 20 vegetables daily, including some new varieties with the exact same needs as the old ones.

Third stage: Bang on more rocks, now in a cave! Construct an even wider range of pointless items! Interact with your 20 animals and 20 vegetables daily!

Fourth stage: ???


For some reason, I'm not all that excited to see what we get next.

It brought us some pretty nice glam items and mounts

The thing is, we would have got nice glam items one way or another. They would have come through some other content if not through this.

Unfortunately, they thought for whatever reason making a sweatshop out of our "island paradise" would somehow excite players. Which has completely backfired. So they're abandoning ship and trying again with another form of lifestyle content. Can't say I'm entirely optimistic given Island Sanctuary was inspired by the dev team playing a lot of Animal Crossing. How they landed on what we got from Animal Crossing remains baffling to me.

All of this. I would bet that they wandered off the original vision in increments – needing something to enable crafting for players who didn't level their own skills, thinking of ways to make the content infinitely repeatable – but one way or another, they ended up quite far from the vision and either somehow don't see it or just never thought to evaluate it based on the original idea because they were too focused on how the system would work in the form it ended up in.