Telltale-Like Star Trek Game Is Getting Pulled From Sale Forever

In 2023, former Telltale developers Dramatic Labs put together a Star Trek game in the style of the old studio’s interactive adventures. Star Trek: Resurgence, set in the Next Generation era of the franchise (Riker’s about, Spock’s very old), proved extremely popular with players and fair-to-middling with critics. But now, less than three years later (thanks RPS), it’s time is about to be up. Publisher Bruner House has posted a very short note to the game’s Steam page to say it’s about to be delisted and taken from sale.

“Our license to distribute Star Trek: Resurgence has come to an end,” begins the extremely brief update, “so the game will no longer be offered for sale. Existing customers can continue to access the game via their Steam library.” It concludes, “Thanks to everyone who was able to enjoy the game! LLAP!” The latter being a somewhat ironic abbreviation of “live long and prosper.”

Tales Told

Telltale games like The Walking Dead, Tales from the Borderlands and The Wolf Among Us proved extremely popular, but overreach and half-cooked projects like Back to the Future, Jurassic Park and Batman, alongside a growing lack of patience with the episodic release model, saw the wheels coming off around 2017, and its eventual grim closure in 2018. A new version of the company then sprang up the same year, but has yet to release a single game beyond its 2019 mopping up of the Walking Dead entries. But before and after the collapse of Telltale in 2018, many of its developers split off to form new, smaller studios with an intention to continue the former studio’s ethos of narrative-driven adventures with player choices affecting the ways the stories were told.

The most successful examples of early leavers would be Campo Santo which released the wonderful Firewatch, and Night School Studio that made the exquisite Oxenfree games. However, the most notable post-collapse team is Dramatic Labs, which took more than 20 ex-Telltale devs and went on to create Star Trek: Resurgence.

Taking the sweet, sweet Epic money that was around back then in exchange for a year’s exclusivity on the Epic Game Store, the studio released Resurgence over there in 2023, and then brought it to Steam in 2024, where it proved really popular. 89 percent positive reviews and somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 sales, despite being a year old, are nothing to sniff at, not least when development costs would likely have been at least in part covered by Epic. But clearly the deal Dramatic Labs made with Paramount for the Star Trek license was initially agreed at three years, and for whatever reason that’s not been extended. We’ve reached out to Dramatic Labs to ask for more information on the sorts of licensing deals smaller studios are being asked to sign, and why they expire when there are, of course, Star Trek games from 20, 30 years ago still on sale.

Right now, you can still pick up the game from Steam (and Epic) for $25. There’s no details on exactly when the game will disappear (although I’d guess at May 22 given that’d be three years on from its first release), so if you want to ever be able to play it, now’s the time to grab it.