A Steam Community Announcement has word that "the sun sets on Moonrise," as Undead Labs says that the response to the Early Access and early mobile versions of Moonrise has lead them to decide not to release their virtual card game commercially (thanks Gamer's Hell). Their first foray into the free-to-play marketplace has garnered "mostly positive" reviews, but they say that there was a tendency for players to move on pretty quickly after checking this out, which would not justify the cost of running online servers. They are going out in style, however, releasing a new patch to "open the floodgates," and promising to continue to operate the game for the rest of the year. Here's word:

In light of this, we won’t be commercially releasing Moonrise. There are some fantastic elements to the game that we’re extremely proud of, and those might find their way into a future game someday, but for now we’re going to make some changes to the game that make it a blast to play for our existing players.

Since we won’t have to worry about whether the game is profitable, we can just have some fun and open the floodgates. We’re updating the game with new Solari, wildlands, dungeons, and clothing shops. We’re also increasing rewards in Arena Mode, making it easier to earn XP and hit upgrade and evolution milestones, increasing drop rates, decreasing leveling time, and generally making the game play faster and easier across the board. We’re also giving every player a free Sunset Pack containing 2,000 gems, 10,000 gold, two Solari Boosters, and a bunch of essences. Detailed patch notes are here.

This update will be available on Steam today. We’ll keep the servers running for the rest of the year, ending midnight, December 31.