Bringing along a space-battle hardened team, James Brooksby and Chris Mehers founded Edge Case Games in 2014. The following years would be dedicated to the development of Fractured Space, an ambitious title that would stand as the development teams magnum opus, following their revival of the space combat genre with Strike Suit Zero at Born Ready Games.
The team noted a recent trend amongst players towards Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games, a category which set small teams of heroic characters against each other in a skirmish towards the others base. Carefully constructed environments channeled players along specific lanes of travel, creating head-on collisions that were as much fun to watch as they were to play.
Edge Case Games imagined how well the MOBA format could be applied to space-based battles on an enormous scale, a concept which had yet to be explored. Confident in their ideas, a plan was set in motion to explore how Fractured Space could deliver a Science Fiction experience that people had never played before.
The companies leadership also saw the move towards PC free-to-play, with some very big successes in this burgeoning area in the years while they were building Strike Suit Zero. It was decided to work towards building a game with all the various f2p mechanics, which was an ambitious move away from the teams experience. A new publishing team was built around the game to support this move, and the team had to re-think much of its understanding of games making. As Brooksby likes to call it, Free to play games making is more of a mixture of science, psychology and games design.
As independent developers the Edge Case Games team were open to experimenting with new methods of game distribution and pre-launch community building. A precedent for doing so was built into the studios DNA since first pioneering digital distribution as Doublesix and subsequently releasing the first game on ID@Xbox as Born Ready Games. Continuing the tradition and set against an impressive backdrop of asteroid fields, glowing planets and the endless darkness of space, Edge Case Games would first release their vision to the world in November 2014 with the launch of Fractured Space on Steam Early Access.
Founder James Brooksby remembers that before the game went live in this way, some of the team were begging not to do it. They thought that it was going to be a terrible decision because the game was not finished and before Steam Early Access, you simply couldn’t launch unfinished games. Much of the company believed in the idea however and were quickly proven right, as Fractured Space built a dedicated community of highly invested players through the platform.
This community helped Edge Case Games to refine their title throughout the rest of its development and changed the working environment within the studio for the better. Brooksby noted that now, every member of staff was coming to work with one thing on their mind – that they had a good game and now their job was to make it better. This was a step change from the way things had been done before, where typically development teams would believe in the quality of their game but lack any real-world evidence. Fractured space went on to be well regarded by critics and loved by its community.
Ultimately Fractured Space was a game that deserved to reach a far bigger audience than it did and so unfortunately, four years after its maiden voyage, the team were forced to move on from further development of the game. In the interest of serving the community who had contributed so much to Fractured Space, Edge Case Games kept the multiplayer servers online until the company was acquired by Wargaming UK in 2018.
Following a handover period, Edge Case CEO James Brooksby founded Absolutely Games in 2019. Edge Case co-founder Chris Meher stayed on at Wargaming UK as studio director and the team rebranded themselves to become DPS Games in 2020.
