Marmalade has ceased investment in its SDK after increasing pressure from competitors and distributors.

On signing up to the Marmalade site, users are now greeted with a post announcing the discontinuation of the SDK as the team has not been able to turn Marmalade into “a sustainable business.”

The developer cites pressure from competitors like Unity and Unreal as reasons for deciding to cease work on the tool.

“We used to believe Marmalade SDK is superior in performance comparing to Unity, and we also believe Marmalade provides better mobile platform support comparing to Unreal Engine,” said Marmalade Team Japan in the post, that requires an active account to view

“However, the world changed in a tremendous speed. Unity addressed it's performance issue within latest releases, on the other hand Unreal Engine also did a great job supporting modern mobile platform. It's a never ending arm race.”

Trouble in store

On top of trouble keeping up with the competition, Marmalade has had continued issues working alongside Apple’s constant changes to iOS.

“Recently, we are struggling with iOS. As you all know, Apple changed the policy 2 times in Q1. We were swamped.

“We had no choice to stop all the task related to iOS 11 to solve the issues, as a result, the schedule is hugely delayed. And as you all know, Apple might change it's policy anytime. Which means Marmalade SDK is going to be obsolete again right after it's released.”

This isn’t the first time Marmalade has hit rough waters - but it could be the last. The team previously announced it would cease development back in September 2016, before GMO Cloud acquired rights to the SDK four months later.