Daedalic quits game development and fires 25 employees after Gollum fails

Daedalic Entertainment will no longer develop its own video games after a failed launch The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. Nacon’s subsidiary plans to focus on publishing.

Weekend, Games Wirtschaft, Germany reported that Daedalic Entertainment will stop developing games at its Hamburg-based studio. In an internal statement, the company cited “difficult turning points” as the reason for the decision.

After Gollum’s failure, Daedalic laid off 25 of its more than 90 employees, with management saying “we value every member of our team and it was important to us that the transition was as smooth as possible.”

In the future, the company will only focus on the publishing business.Its product portfolio already includes such this is a peanut, shadow tactics, tracklessand Iratus: Lord of the Dead.Overall, Daedalic plans to launch eight games this fiscal year, including surviving deponia From AtomicTorch Studio.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum launched on May 25 to mostly negative reviews with an average rating of meta score 34-39/100. The game currently has a 34% rating on Steam based on 307 reviews.according to steam databasewith a peak concurrent player count of just 758 – one of the worst results in Daedalic history.

Dadalik tell the polygon Over the weekend, Gollum “did not live up to our expectations for the game.” As a result, the German company also canceled another Lord of the Rings project it had been working on since mid-2022.

Daedalic Entertainment was established in 2007 to landfill series.last year it Acquired by French publisher Nacon 53 million euros.