Velev shuts down servers on Steam just days after Early Access launch

A new game on Steam, Velev, has shut down access less than a week after its Early Access launch. This nearly cuts Concord’s infamous shutdown in half, though, notably, this is a small independent team, as opposed to a PlayStation Studios project. Velev was a PvPvE action RPG with some battle royale mechanics, created by a team called Chaf. Of the eighty-six player reviews on its Steam page, Velev only managed a 56% positive review score.

The odd story of Velev, an interesting indie game that shut down in less than a week

The story of Velev sounds like a fun fantasy premise. A mysterious disaster resulted in a civilization sinking into the ground. Now, adventurers brave the depths to find loot and treasure, but there’s not only monsters but other players to contend with as well. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to try out the game myself, so I can only share details based on the description and gameplay videos. Many of the mechanics appear to draw from MOBA games like League of Legends, and there is also a large map that slowly shrinks, not unlike Fortnite or PUBG, forcing you to venture to a certain area of the map.

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The game launched in Early Access on April 9th, with the developers sharing the excitement on Steam. At first everything sounded normal, with the devs saying: “We’ve packed in tons of new content, and we’re confident you’re going to love it. As always, your feedback is super important to us – please let us know what you think!” The same day, the devs even shared a post explaining that they are experiencing server issues “…due to an unexpectedly high number of players…” Unless that server issue is something they could not solve, this does sound like a good problem to have.

Just four days after the Early Access launch, a new post on Steam was titled “VELEV Service Shutdown Announcement.” The devs explained “…we weren’t able to reach the point we needed to continue supporting and servicing Velev. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t secure the investment we needed from VCs or larger partners.” With this happening so shortly after launch, it could easily ring alarm bells of a Steam scam, much like The Day Before controversy. But the devs also explain that they launched in Early Access hoping for sales to provide the necessary financial support for the team to keep working on the game. Unfortunately, that hope didn’t work out for them.

In that same post, the devs shared what the next steps will be. “Velev will transition to a Free-to-Play model, and all purchases will be fully refunded. The server will shut down, but the date has not been set yet.” This was shortly followed by the game becoming unavailable on Steam just two days later, on April 15th. One final Steam post form the devs explained: “We intended to keep the game free to play, but our game was shut down and we had to close the servers.” They also apologized for how sudden this was and how things turned out. The specific wording of “our game was shut down” is concerning, as if there was maybe another team making certain calls, but ultimately this seems like a valiant effort from an independent studio that did not work out.

Unfortunately for fans of Velev, this does seem to be the end of this story. It’s hard to imagine a future where this small game can return. For now, the primary hope is that Chaf, the studio behind this game, learned a few important lessons with this and is able to work on another project at some point in the future.

Velev

April 15, 2025

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• Overview

• Steam
• indie games
• Early Access
• shutdown of servers
• PC