What do you do when you're a small development team cracking away at your next project, that still wants to support your last game and its community but can't find the manpower?
Unknown Worlds, the developers of Natural Selection II, have come up with an answer for that. They're handling over the reigns of the game to a crack team of fans.
Detailing the change on the game's forum, community members Wasabi and Obraxis write:
Unknown Worlds Entertainment is a small team, currently their time and resources are going into exciting new projects. However, because they love NS2 so much, they have entrusted their very valuable IP in the hands of the NS2 community, who will nurture and cherish it in order to continue to evolve NS2, as it always has. This win-win scenario will allow Unknown Worlds to focus on their next project and we get to potentially continue to create new patches for NS2."
"Now with Unknown World's blessing, we as a community can forge patch 266. We can hopefully start to incorporate the best the community has to offer, such as bug fixes and popular features...with many more ideas for the future!"
Meanwhile, Unknown Worlds are free to chip away at their upcoming game Subnautica.
For those who don't know, Natural Selection is a team-based multiplayer game that combines traditional shooter gameplay with a real-time strategy layer.