Daedalic has canned development on all of its upcoming games after the massive failure of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. The German company announced that it will now focus entirely on publishing. This means that Daedalic will pick up titles to market and publish for other studios around the world.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was launched in May with some rather nasty reviews and user feedback. It is now the lowest-rated game of the year. Shortly after its launch, Daedalic released a statement apologizing for the state of the game. The development team claims to be sorry for the “underwhelming experience”.
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While the dust has somewhat settled on the disaster, Daedalic is still feeling the ripples. The company has been forced to retrench 25 workers as a result of the game’s launch. In a statement, the company says the departure from a development studio to a publishing house has been a “difficult turning point”.
“We value each and every member of our team and it is important to us that the transition goes as smoothly as possible. Therefore, we will support our former employees in finding new opportunities within our network.”
Daedalic was also working on a second game set in The Lord of the Rings universe. That has also been canned. Thankfully, development on this other game only started in 2022 so it wasn’t long in development at the time.
Daedalic was also working on a Deponia game called Surviving Deponia. However, that title was outsourced to an external company AtomicTorch Studios. So the game won’t be affected by the recent changes.
Nacon acquired Daedalic Entertainment last year and published The Lord of The Rings: Gollum. It is unclear how the publishing business will change now that Daedalic is also undertaking game publishing.
