Project Zomboid fans briefly petitioned its developer and publisher, The Indie Stone, yesterday after access to the latest version of the beloved community project, PZmap, a community-created but officially supported resource, suddenly disappeared overnight. This follows a previous announcement from The Indie Stone in July that PZmap had been adjusted to work with Project Zomboid’s new B42 update, leaving fans confused as to the reasoning behind the sudden u-turn.
To put this in context, the community-created PZmap website is a borderline essential tool for those who want to play Project Zomboid online. While the intentionally limited in-game map that players are provided with is great for offline play, PZmap’s more specific, online-focused tools and resources make it a necessity for online play.
While PZmap wasn’t created by The Indie Stone, the team did officially support the project by hosting its servers–that is, until said support suddenly ceased last night on August 7. Project Zomboid players rushed to the subreddit to question why support for the latest version of PZmap had disappeared, prompting Calvy, the manager of both PZmap and the PZwiki, to put up a post explaining that The Indie Stone’s management “decided that they no longer wish to support” the project.
“I just wanted to put something out as there’s clearly been quite an unexpected change,” Calvy announced in a post on Reddit. “I’m quite limited on what I can say so I can’t really speak on specifics, however, unfortunately The Indie Stone’s management has decided that they no longer wish to support the interactive map in an official manner, and have asked me to remove it from their servers.”
This prompted a very short-lived petition on Change.org, which ultimately shut down following an official response from Project Zomboid’s developers: “We did not expect people to lose access to it, and we apologise for that. We’re hopeful that the map will become available again soon as a community resource, when we will fully support it as a community maintained site[…]Today’s disruption was ultimately an unfortunate mistake due to timing and some crossed wires. We can’t get into specifics for privacy reasons, but there was no intention here to alarm anyone or make you think the map was being permanently disabled.”
However, the official response from The Indie Stone hasn’t quelled the fanbase’s anger, mostly due to the team’s explanation that it was “an unfortunate mistake due to timing and some crossed wires” conflicting with Calvy’s response that they were directly asked “to remove it from The Indie Stone servers.”
So, without a direct official explanation from either side, what exactly led to this? As many have theorized, it likely has something to do with Project Zomboid’s massive sudden uptick in players. The previous highest Project Zomboid concurrent player count on Steam was in January 2022, following the release of the Build 41 update, which amounted to roughly 65,500 players.
The current highest concurrent player count is almost twice that, amounting to roughly 121,600 players, which occurred roughly six days ago following the release of the Build 42 update. What’s likely happened is that, following PZmap’s integration into The Indie Stone’s official website in July, the Project Zomboid team suddenly realised that hosting the servers for PZmap wasn’t cheap when over 100,000 people are trying to play the game at once.