No more Friday the 13th DLC ever, says Gun Media

Gun Media has confirmed that the company's decision to halt development on new content for its competitive multiplayer slash-'em-up Friday the 13th is now permanent, no matter the outcome of the legal action between two of the franchise's original creators.

Following its release back in June last year, Friday the 13th - which pits a team of players in the role of camp counsellors and a single player in the role of hockey-mask-adorned knife enthusiast Jason Vorhees as they recreate the rough events of the Friday the 13th film franchise as a competitive game - was generally well received bar complaints of a lack of content and various software bugs. Publisher Gun Media, to its credit, addressed these concerns with a string of updates and downloadable content - but the process ground to a halt earlier this month when the company halted development in the face of a lawsuit between the writer and director, Victor Miller and Shaun Cunningham, of the original film.

At the time, the halt was positioned as temporary pending resolution of the case. Now, though, Gun Media president Wes Keltner has officially confirmed that the game will never again receive a single piece of downloadable content. '"Is there a chance of any content being added to the game if a ruling on the dispute occurs in the near future?" The answer is no,' Keltner writes on the game's forum. 'Development on games can’t just pause indefinitely and pick back up again; it doesn’t work that way. Especially when you have no idea when that future date will occur.

'We can’t keep building content that may never see the light of day. That’s bad business. I’ve also had questions about adding “non-F13" related content to the game. "Can’t you make a new level or a new counselor [sic] that has nothing to do with the films?" We can’t do that either. We can’t add any content, whatsoever. Nada. Not even a new tree or rock.'

While Keltner has confirmed that bug-fixing development - including the planned launch of dedicated servers for the console port of the game - continues, fans are understandably disappointed, with some declaring it a 'dead game' as a result.