Project Spark

Project Spark was a game creation video game for Microsoft Windows 8.1, 10 and Xbox One. The game was announced during Microsoft's E3 2013 press event, and was launched as a Windows open beta in December of 2013, and an Xbox One beta in March of 2014. Community Manager, Thomas Gratz, posted to the Project Spark forums on May 13th, 2016 announcing that the game was no longer available to download on Xbox One or Windows as of that day. User created content would no longer be available to those who still had Project Spark installed after August 12th, 2016.

According to the post, with the game’s October of 2015 update active development was stopped, premium content was made free to users and many of Team Dakota’s members moved on to other projects within Microsoft. Gratz adds that after this point it was “no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping Project Spark up and running with meaningful updates and bug fixes”.

The decision was made to sunset the game on May 13th but to give active users a grace period to download any community created content to play offline after August 12th. A refund was also issued to users who may have purchased and activated the retail version of the game. While the retail release may still be available it contains only a download code for the game, not a physical disc, and is unusable as of May 13th, 2016. Re-downloading Project Spark from the Xbox account purchase history page was possible after the May 13th delisting but is presumed to be unavailable after August 12th.