Now it has happened. As the Hamburg studio announced, the development department will be closed. This makes Gollum the last game from Daedalic.
Edna Breaks Out, The Whispered World or the Deponia series. These are the adventures with which the German studio Daedalic opened a door into the hearts of many gamers. But as the studio has now officially announced, it will no longer be developing its own games in the future.
This news comes shortly after the studio had to deal with extreme criticism, which was primarily related to the miserable state of their last title The Lord of the Rings: Gollum The sneak adventure game was neither convincing from a technical nor a content point of view. Doubly bitter, since it was the studio’s most expensive production to date. Even if its budget was still far removed from international blockbusters, which is also part of the truth.
Now Gollum remains Daedalic’s last independently developed video game. The studio previously suffered a major setback with the cancellation of the ambitious real-time strategy game A Year of Rain
Publisher instead of developer
To be more precise, Daedlic is closing its own development department and is also discontinuing an ongoing project Actually, it was already known that the studio was working on another game in the Lord of the Rings universe, for which even 2 million euros were provided by the Ministry of Economy as funding.
The recently announced survival title Surviving Deponia is not affected by the decision. The technical development lies with the external studio AtomicTorch, Daedalic is responsible for the creative design (story, dialogues and quests).
In general, this development does not mean that Daedalic is closing down completely. In the future, the company will focus exclusively on the distribution of video games. As a publisher, Daedalic has been quite successful in recent years and has also been able to land some smaller hits on an international level, especially in the indie segment.
Among the publishing successes are Shadow Tactics and its add-on Aiko’s Choice, The Suicide of Rachel Foster, Inkulinati and most recently the co-op submarine simulation Barotrauma, which was released on 13 March and has 94 percent positive Steam reviews. In the GlobalESportNews test of Barotrauma it was still enough for a 78.
Daedalic will continue to exist as a publisher, but its days as a developer studio are over, which also includes job cuts. A total of 25 employees will lose their positions. Daedalic says it is trying to find new jobs for them in its own network.
