This week, we received the sad news that Luminous Productions, the developer studio of Forspoken, will close its doors and will be integrated into Square Enix, the company to which it belonged. A video game that left no one indifferent since we were able to try the demo for the first time, but that has finally turned out to be a disappointment for many of the players who bought it.
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Although the “survivor’s bias” makes us think that videogames are a safe bet for companies and that they “strike it rich”, there are many titles that end up crashing and causing their studios to lose thousands and even millions of dollars. Studios that had great professionals behind them, but that, for various reasons, ended up going bankrupt or dissolving because of their creations. Do you want to know some of them? We show them to you.
Mass Effect: Andromeda – BioWare Montreal
The Mass Effect saga was synonymous with success for many years for BioWare. Along with the Dragon Age saga, the Mass Effect trilogy was the flagship of the company since the release of the first title, in 2007, until the arrival of the third installment, in 2012. After an ending (or endings, depending on how you look at it) that left a strange taste in the mouths of many fans, there were many voices calling for a fourth part of the saga. And it ended up coming, but it was not the great game that many expected.
Mass Effect: Andromeda was BioWare’s answer, although the development was carried out by one of its branches: BioWare Montreal. The sum of several factors, including the inexperience of the developers in creating video games from scratch and the lack of communication between project managers, ended up leading to a video game heavily criticized for its (many) errors and the consequent dissolution of BioWare Montreal in 2017, which became part of EA’s Motive Studios.
Okami – Clover Studios
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Good works do not always end up being successful. This is something we know thanks to examples from the art world such as Vincent van Gogh, who, despite being considered today one of the best artists in history, his works did not achieve the success they deserved when he was alive. A circumstance similar to that experienced by Clover Studios, the parents of the (now) consecrated Okami.
With great professionals like Hideki Kamiya and Shinji Mikami, creators of the Devil May Cry and Resident Evil sagas, respectively, Okami was even considered Game of the Year in 2006, although its great quality did not match its sales: 600,000 units were sold that year. A huge commercial failure that meant the end of the Capcom studio, although many of its members eventually joined the ranks of PlatinumGames, the developers of the Bayonetta saga and NieR: Automata.
Too Human – Silicon Knights
Silicon Knights was a very reputable studio in the 90s-2000s that had great games in its portfolio, including Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, the remake of the famous PS1 videogame created by Hideo Kojima; Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, which would lead to its spin-off Soul Reaver, and Eternal Darkness, one of the first great psychological horror videogames. However, his good fame would end up ending because of Too Human (and because of his bad decisions).
After a decade-long development (something difficult to see nowadays and completely unheard of in the 2000s), Too Human had a very cold reception and a very low valuation by the press. All this, added to the fact that it was proven in court that Silicon Knights used a stolen version of Epic Games’ proprietary Unreal Engine 3 graphics engine, led to the studio’s bankruptcy in 2014.
