Whatever Happened to Serum?

[Editor’s Note – May 2nd]
Serum posted a small news update after this went live. TL;DR: an update’s supposedly coming sometime this year, including multiplayer and some “QoL” tweaks.
Oh—and they renamed it to Serum: Toxic Survival.
Kinda wondering if this means Toplitz is leaning into a new naming scheme, like their whole “_____ Dynasty” catalog, but for survival titles. 😂

It’s April 2025, and Serum hasn’t had a content patch in forever. Not even the usual indie dev “trust us, big stuff coming” stuff in Discord, just promises from the Publisher. Is the game dead? Abandoned? Stuck in development limbo? All the things? To get why Serum is circling the drain, we need to do some digging behind the scenes. It’s not just about a dead Discord or missing patches. It’s a whole convoluted cluster.
(But not a cluster that keeps on fucking – that is reserved specifically for The Day Before.) 

Just to be clear! This will not be an exhaustive mega-journalist study with interviews and informants. I don’t have the budget (or training) for that – plus, I never liked the game anyway.

The Early Days of Game Island: A New Subsidiary With Big Dreams

Game Island was spun up in July 2020 by The Dust (officially The Dust Spółka Akcyjna (S.A.), or The Dust Group if I name-swap mid-article), a Polish studio with a thing for weird religious games and survival pipe dreams. The idea was to let Game Island crank out smaller-scale survival titles under The Dust’s guidance (and financial oversight). They started with what sounds like a stupidly ambitious plan: up to 15 games, co-financed by investors who thought survival games were the next big thing.

They announced four games early on:

• Deadly Desert (father-son drama in the Nevada sands),
• The Day After (natural disaster post-apoc),
• Bunker Survival (nuclear doomsday and smartwatches),
• and Serum (the one we actually got).

All of them lived briefly as concepts, with Steam pages and Discord-hosted subchannels for each title – until the team axed the other three in early 2022 to focus on Serum. This, by the way, is where I entered the scene – back before they’d fully decided to lock in on Serum. At that point, you could browse subchannels for all the games and see them easily on Steam. After they purged the Discord to go all-in on Serum, the other titles were buried under the Steam developer tag for GI. (Which I assume, big leap, stands for Game Island.)

Around this point in 2022, someone dropped what became a four-page, fifty-six-comment thread about how the game wasn’t worth following. I jumped in with some observations.

But even then, I’ve got to say – some of the replies from a Toplitz rep came off super MEH.

So, y’know, how’s that redemption arc treating you here in 2025?

(Even funnier: the topic got locked right after my final post.)

Serum’s Big Reveal and Buzzword Hype

Serum was (possibly officially? It’s exhausting to translate five million pages from Polish and other languages) revealed in April 2021 as the second game planned for Game Island, following the work-in-progress Bunker Survival. It was pitched as a time-based survival game where you’re infected, implanted, and forced to shoot up glowing green liquid every few hours to avoid dying. You craft, explore, and get chased by radioactive forest creatures.

January 2022: announced they were shelving the other titles to focus on Serum.
(Note that Soltys is (was?) part of Toplitz.)

In July of that year, they signed a publishing deal with Toplitz Productions, which was already ass-deep in niche simulation games (an endless succession of DYNASTY DYNASTY DYNASTY) and Early Access projects. The promise? Serum would launch in Q4 2023.

It didn’t.

Delayed, Then Dumped? (Or Sold, Then Stared At, Then Maybe Dumped in the Future?)

Instead of launching, Game Island quietly missed the 2023 window and slipped into 2024 without saying much. Then, in May 2024, they finally dropped the Early Access build of Serum on Steam. It wasn’t good.

I want to stress here that from the time the game hit Early Access to its current incarnation, I haven’t laid hands on it again. I spent time in the playtest and, from that hands-on experience, I knew it needed a long time to cook. Plus, the way they – Toplitz and Game Island – were handling community discussions and their proposed timeline just made me feel like it was safer to check back on it in a year or seven. My opinion of the current game has been formed from observing gameplay videos, reading patch notes, and talking to close friends with similar expertise and genre experience.

Anyway. Performance issues, bugs, repetitive gameplay loops, and a player base that quickly grew frustrated and disillusioned. Despite some clever mechanics and decent art, the game felt half-baked. Press coverage ranged from “meh” to “might be worth checking back in a year if it survives.” (It’s me. I’m Press.) Checking on it today, one month shy of a year post-release, it’s sitting at 55% positive with only 194 reviews.

And apparently, behind the scenes, things were crumbling??? Or at the very least, in a large amount of upheaval. In July 2024, Game Island sold the rights to Serum to Toplitz for €100,000. And just like that, the project that was supposed to save (launch? save?) the studio now belongs entirely to the publisher.

Then The Dust pulled the ripcord.

In December 2024, they sold off their shares in Game Island, and Game Island disappeared from The Dust’s financials entirely.

So Where Are They Now?

Honestly? No idea.

Many Game Island developers have left the game’s Discord server, which makes sense. They no longer own, or can speak for, the IP, so I assume this is just an easy way to avoid being hounded by community members. (Ask me how I know.) Scuttlebutt in the servers (not verified by me, because I’m not chasing random rumors or sliding into anyone’s DMs) claims that some former GI developers told folks – via DM?? – that they’re off the project or out of the studio entirely. Again: no idea. I haven’t confirmed that. But poking around on LinkedIn did show that some former employees have moved on to other studios.

The company’s site has gone dark more than once, and its new parent company, Me & My Friends S.A., is a Wrocław-based digital agency? Which seems random.

(That, actually, appears to be a whole other thing – because, and bear with me here, translating endless pages of Polish stock filings into English via web translators is frustrating as fuck – but it seems like MAMF owned shares in The Dust at one point… then bought out their Game Island shares? Is this like a “Musk uses Company B to buy Twitter and dodge liability” kind of deal? I don’t know. I’m not a stock expert or even good at math. I could imagine, though, a shiny investor-facing brand wanting the crap performer gone from it’s collection of shinier things.)

Maybe they’re hard at work on the game somewhere?

Because, studying the Toplitz buyout document – again, translated – it seems like the Game Island devs were supposed to use that €100k payout to finish the game, multiplayer and all, by the end of Q4 2024.

The Bottom Line

Serum was never the main issue. To me, Game Island overpromised, overextended, and underdelivered – 15 games??? – and they’re just a textbook indie flameout. I suppose it lasted longer than most because, like many Polish studios I’ve looked at, it was associated with Poland’s stock market- for this studio, through parent company The Dust.
Maybe that makes it easier to get propped up by investor and publisher money?

The fact that Serum hasn’t been updated in so long isn’t surprising. It’s expected. Unless Toplitz decides to Frankenstein it back to life, which seems like an uphill slog as each month sheds more of its defenders, the game will probably rot in Early Access purgatory.

Just like the rest of them.