“It has been an incredibly difficult journey,” Equinox: Homecoming Team shares Past Struggles, Recent Achievements and Future Hopes

Disclaimer: This article is about a game I’ve done paid consultation work for in the past. 

Equinox: Homecoming is a murder mystery horse game that you can play online with friends. Developed by Blue Scarab Entertainment from Sweden, the game was released into Early Access in May 2025 and celebrated its 1.0 release in March 2026. Now admittedly, I have not had a ton of time to play any recent versions of the game myself – I’ve been busy publishing Horses of Hoofprint Bay, in case you somehow missed that – but I generally really like and support Equinox’ ambitions to be a more “grown up” kind of horse game in this often very kid-friendly genre. 

This week, the team – which by now includes my friend and fellow TMQ moderator Kalma – approached me to provide a bit of a showcase of what’s happened in the game these past few months, and with a ton of valuable insight from Blue Scarab’s Co-Founder and CEO Colin Cragg about Equinox’ financial situation as a very ambitious, veteran-built, horse-focused MMO game, being made in a time that’s very dire for game funding. Let’s take a look:

Community-Driven Development

“We've had nearly 50 updates since launch”, says Community Manager Mirja H., better known in the TMQ and Equinox Communities under her online handle Kalma. “Bug fixes, quality of life improvements, adding new features like your horse becoming visibly dirty until you brush it and then gradually it'll get dirty again... We continue to keep doing this, trying to improve things on every update.”

When the game first launched, a common refrain among players was that horses did not have enough relevance in the game’s story and mechanics. The team reacted to this with a drastic shift in strategy for new game content: Every horse added post-release would be a character of its own, with a name, personality and dedicated missions. “Horses are more than just colour variants of the same model,” Kalma explains. “Every horse has a different story which reflects real life things you encounter with horses; their fears, behaviours, individual personalities.”

Other bits of horse liveliness are added in between, like a recent patch adding grazing behavior. It’s almost like someone sent the team a lengthy article outlining ways to make horses in games feel like living creatures 😇.

Next to the individual horses’ story missions, the game’s main quest is also continuing to unfold even well past the 1.0 Release: “We have six story chapters so far, and the story of Alex's mothers disappearance seems more complicated than what it seemed at first,” Kalma says. “We have tried not to shy away from the mature themes and elements of the story.”

She emphasizes the importance of player input when it comes to setting priorities in the game’s development: “We let community feedback shape the direction we go towards.” With a hefty Halloween update recently released, Kalma teases further plans and shares some preview screenshots of Alderwood island covered in snow: “Winter and Christmas are on the way, and there are some thundering hooves coming along with it!”

Meanwhile, Chapter 7 of the main story is slated for release in January 2027.

A Rocky Road

Aside from Kalma’s insights into recent developments, Blue Scarab’s Co-Founder and CEO Colin Cragg reached out to provide a detailed recap of Equinox’ development and the ups and downs the project has been through since its inception. 

“It has been an incredibly difficult journey,” Colin explains, saying that making a game like Equinox: Homecoming was always a dream for him. “I'd run into fans of other games I'd worked on and they had always told me they wanted something ‘More realistic’, something that was ‘not a story for little kids’, or ‘something dark’”. 

The main story of Equinox: Homecoming has the main character investigate the mysterious disappearance of their mother… and encounter bizarrely misshapen animals in the process. Not your usual “save the barn” plotline!

Colin recounts horse game fans telling him that they were tired of being treated like kids and “being handed low budget cartoons with badly done horses by companies and being told to be satisfied with what they received”. A statement that rings very true to me, and probably most readers of this website. It was based on those exchanges with players of other horse games that the idea that would become Equinox took form. 

Finding the funding to begin implementing that idea was quite the process too: “We had to speak with a huge number of investors to find a few who would believe in us and the story we wanted to tell,” says Colin. “Many of them had no idea that people wanted to play horse games. Many had never even heard about Star Stable or any other horse games. Many simply believed the audience didn't exist – and if they did they sure as hell didn't respect the audience.”

Colin’s insistence that there was a business case in an adult horse MMO would eventually bear fruit: “We kept on knocking on doors until we found some people who understood what we could do.” 

Even so, Equinox was fighting an uphill battle: “Large scale MMOs are normally built by 300+ people over a period of 7 years with budgets of 100+ million dollars,” Colin estimates. “We were extremely stubborn and we were going to do it for a fraction of that budget. For everything we did, we were basically missing a zero from the budget and the number of staff.” He cites Unreal Engine 5 as a crucial factor in enabling the team to even dream of making a game of this scope. 

Early prototype screenshot, from around 2023

Early prototype screenshot, from around 2023

An early prototype – built primarily on passion and ambition as a small team in 2023 – eventually led to securing funding from NetEase to go into production. “That funding brought us up to our largest team size of around 36 people in June 2024,” says Colin. 

At that time, the team’s philosophy was to build a foundation that could last: Colin refers to his past work on Star Stable and Anarchy Online, games that have been running for 15 and 25 years respectively. “Everything was being done right, but that doesn't mean it was being done cheaply. We had expectations that this was only the initial investment from NetEase and there would be more to carry us through to the full launch of the game.” 

Funding Struggles

Unfortunately, this phase of Equinox’ development journey coincided with some of the worst times for games business: “The game industry entered a pretty dark period with thousands of job losses and studio closures,” Colin recaps. “NetEase had been very good to us – engaged and passionate in the way they offered us support with more than just funding, but also with great feedback on design and narrative feedback on what we were building.”

That support was not in the end meant to last: “At a very high level inside NetEase, a decision was taken in late 2024 that they wouldn't be making any more follow-on investments inside any of the western Studios they had funded,” reveals Colin. “This had a disastrous effect on 100+ studios around the world. So our small budget (for this kind of game) was suddenly almost 50% smaller than what had been planned. NetEase was very helpful in trying to find new sources of funding for us, but in difficult times this proved to be mostly impossible.” 

Scrambling to find a way to keep paying their staff and planning their future, Blue Scarab got additional support from Behold Ventures, one of their other early investors. “The amazing team at Behold Ventures really went out on a limb for us to help us get out into early access and then to help carry us to the Live launch of the game,” says Colin and adds that he and several team members committed personal savings to the project to fund development until the full release.

Note the dates: Equinox was actively patching and adding to the game in the weeks following its EA release.

The game entered Early Access in May 2025: “Our Early Access launch was pretty rough,” Colin admits. “We knew we were coming out much earlier (and more broken) than we had planned, but the players of the closed beta we ran gave us such great feedback we were 1000% certain we didn't want to make the rest of the game and polish the mechanics without the ongoing advice from our community. They had to be able to see the game, warts and all, and try it. They really knew what was good and what was bad...and the community was going to help us get the game where it needed to go.”  

Working with the community so closely wasn’t all rosy, but it was necessary for the project, Colin explains: “Some people were a lot angrier than I ever would have expected. Total revamps of multiple systems and content took place.” 

He adds that most things in the game have changed in big or small ways since the Early Access release. “The pace of making these changes and improvements was brutal and it took a physical toll on all of us despite trying to keep track of hours and stay healthy. I'm pretty sure all of us have cried at our desks at least once while building this game.”

Time To Breathe

The team’s hard work led to 46 updates between Early Access release and today. “By the time the launch came around in spring 2026, along with Chapter 4 to continue the story with more content and complete cinematics, we were all physically and emotionally exhausted,” Colin admits. “Everyone had to take their first real vacation in years during the summer or burn out completely.” 

He notes that he himself would end up answering customer service emails during that following Summer, so that other team members could finally take a proper break. “This has been an all consuming passion project for all of us for almost 6 years,” he adds. “To see it grow into what it is now, a little bit at a time, one small step after another, has made it all worthwhile.” 

Colin spends time in the game himself on a regular basis, and says he can hardly believe how far it has come. “The support from our amazing community makes us all find the strength to work harder to keep improving the game. So many specific requests and suggestions by the players have made it into the game now it isn't really ours anymore – it's bigger than that now.”

He goes as far as to mention that he can imagine some day in the future where the Equinox team consists entirely of former players, dreaming of a day 25 years from now when he won’t be around anymore and someone else has picked up the reins. 

The old version of Equinox’ Dutch Warmblood horse raised concerns among players for being too skinny.

The new Dutch Warmblood, after the team was finally able to prioritize this overhaul.

Found Footing 

The Halloween update this October was particularly special to the team: “We managed to finally get out of important big problems like players getting stuck on world geometry. That involved us rebuilding the island’s entire collision system.”

Now, Colin sees a chance to move onward to more fun updates such as seasonal events. 

“When we stopped having to make big structural changes we could finally spend more time adding more pure fun to our world. Having the time to fatten up our starter horse model felt amazing. Adding the sleeping cat from one of the quests to the fishing village so you could find it again made us all very happy.”

“It feels like we can now really enjoy the next steps of the game we are building together,” he adds. More story chapters are planned, and some big undertakings like cross server multiplayer events remain on the to-do list. “But now we feel like we can get those things done… Everything feels achievable!”

Colin thinks back to the various investors who assured the Co-Founders they were crazy for trying to make this project happen, “Hearing people say we've made their dream game has made it all worth it for us, and inspires us to do more. We know we aren't perfect, but we are improving all the time.”

Equinox: Homecoming is available on Steam for PC. A free demo is available on Steam as well!