Lead Project Zomboid developer considered selling the game off due to community backlash

It’s no secret at all that the community (and yours truly) is extremely excited about Project Zomboid‘s upcoming Build 42 update. Though we now know that Build 42 is coming sometime in 2024, a part of the community isn’t thrilled, and there’s been talk of selling the game off.

More specifically, even though Build 42 aims to upgrade almost every aspect of the game by a huge margin, it’s a simple fact of the matter that the current major revision of Project Zomboid, Build 41, was released in 2021. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that some members of the community are unhappy with how much time the developer, The Indie Stone, is taking. This has all come to a head in the comment section of a Project Zomboid YouTuber MrAtomicDuck’s recent video talking about the current state of Build 42, where a lead Zomboid developer Chris Simpson (otherwise known as ‘Lemmy’) stated that the pressure of the development has made him consider outright selling the game off to a different studio.

Project Zomboid’s Chris Simpson had to step away from the community for ‘mental health reasons’

Simpson’s full comment to the video in question is quite lengthy, and it’s already been copied and pasted into the appropriate Reddit discussion thread by user Zontafermg, for future reference. “I’ve not watched the vid for mental health reasons, feel like carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders right now as we always are at this stage of dev, and in my naivety, i looked at these comments and now feel like chewing my lips off my face,” Simpson said. “Am sure it’s fair as Duck is a fair chap, but I can surmise from the comments and nasko’s comments to me what it involves.”

I highly recommend reading up on Simpson’s personal experience about working on Project Zomboid for yourself, but the gist of things is that there’s an immense amount of pressure on him and his team to push Build 42 out as soon as possible, which they’re not all that keen on doing. “We don’t have ANY IDEA accurately how long the update will take. That’s why we don’t have ‘release dates’. Most companies don’t know either, and when they are invariably wrong because they are unable to divine the future, they either end up delaying or rushing out while still its broken,” he said.

“After posting that Thursdoid last addressing the issues, everyone in the comments addressing this video seem oddly punitive. As soon as we release we’ll be ‘doing it right’ for doing what everyone drags us over the coals for now. Been through it a million times by now, we’re the bad guys, slow, incompetent, don’t know what we’re doing, feature bloat, all the classics, all the ‘hits’, then we release and its ‘wow this is great, damn am so glad TIS isn’t like all the other companies out there [that do what I was chastising TIS for not doing a few months back]!!’ I’m used to it by now and increasingly cynical and mentally exhausted by it,” Simpson explained.

The bit that might sound particularly alarming to long-time fans of Zomboid, of course, is the notion that The Indie Stone might wish to wash its hands of the project for the sake of mental health: “We get approached to sell the company and IP all the time, for a LOT,” Simpson said. “It’s sometimes tempting just to be free of this ambient eternal pressure, expectation, and judgment. Honestly, don’t make me talk myself into it any more.”

It doesn’t seem like this is what’s going to happen in the end – not yet, at the very least – but it’s plainly obvious that The Indie Stone and Simpson, specifically, are under a huge deal of stress in getting Zomboid‘s Build 42 out and about. Since Simpson has now availed himself of most social media, he has explained he’ll be leaving direct contact with the community to The Indie Stone’s community manager.

Veteran Project Zomboid players will know that this isn’t the first time that Project Zomboid has had development problems in its long tenure. Notably, back in 2011, The Indie Stone was targeted by “crass and cold-hearted” criticism due to losing the game’s code as part of a burglary, so it’s not too strange to see Chris Simpson taking the community’s less tactful commentary to heart.