Korean developer Challengers Games is closing its doors. 

The news comes via a post on the company's website from CEO and studio Koji Tamura – as reported by GI.biz – who said that the firm had racked up ₩2.4 billion ($1.7 billion) in debt. This is due to server costs, payroll, advertising and marketing, insurance and shareholders. 

As if that wasn't enough, Challengers is also being investigated by Korea's Ministry of Labor and Employment. 

The issues appear to be long-running and are related to the development of Illang and Second Wave. The former was a mobile title that launched in February of this year and had technical issues from the go thanks to server problems. Meanwhile the latter rolled into Steam Early Access on May 31st to overwhelmingly negative reviews. That project is being cancelled as Challengers has no money to pay for servers. 

Tamura says that he hopes to do something else with the Second Wave IP in the future, but for now is refunding people who bought the game on Steam. 

"We are truly sorry to absolutely everyone who has been there for us, rooting for us, supporting us," he wrote. 

"Thank you for believing in us and sorry for letting you down. This is not the final road for us, but it is the final chapter for Challengers Games Corp.

"Thank you for always being there for us and for making us believe in game development again."