Black Flag has been on my bucket list for so long. This would be really cool.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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It’s always sad when a small studio goes under, even if their opening salvo was a flop.
I'm still asking myself who that game was for? I've never seen Gollum in any medium and thought "damn, I want to be him".
The "Gollum" devs, Daedelic, have been around a long time. They were mostly known for classic 2D adventure games, the best known among them were probably the "Deponia" series.
They wanted to go big with "Gollum" and failed even more spectacularly than most people realize: They already ran out of money in 2021 and had to sell themselves to a bigger company who brought in additional funds in order to finish the game. And even the money Daedelic got through that deal was limited, so they had to push out the game no matter what.
Daedilic's been around for a while, hardly an opening salvo. They made some very good point-and-click adventure games. People will point to Deponia series, but my favourite is Memoria.
They managed to build a playable game. It wasn't great but it did mostly function. The big issue was that they made it with a loved franchise. Had this been a game in a new setting, it probably wouldn't have been beaten up so badly.
Having watched a twitch stream of it, naahhhh, I doubt it. There would be less negativity if it werent for the LOTR license but only because nobody would even care about it then, it'd fly under the radar. It's frankly a pretty bad game from multiple aspects, the technical, gameplay and narrative. There must have been hell going on during its development.
I think you need to take the monetization into account as well. The game was a complete mess. At $20 you could maybe get away with saying, "aww, nice job for trying, I hope you learned stuff for next time!" This was a full price game, they knew what they had, this was an attempt to claw money back with a shovelware release.
I'm a little bit over the idea of feeling bad for employees at studios that are predatory and anti consumer. If there are talented and motivated creatives as we like to think, moving on from these companies can help us get great indie games and reshuffle talent in the overall industry. Bad studios and publishers going down is good for the herd.