“We are heartbroken” The father of the brilliant Mass Effect closes his studio and cancels his SF video game

Game news “We are heartbroken” The father of the brilliant Mass Effect closes his studio and cancels his SF video game

The end of humanity

In 2020, Casey Hudson, developer known for creating the series Mass Effectleft Bioware for the second time after having already slammed the door between 2014 and 2017. Indeed, with the future of the studio in limbo following the failure of its Anthemthe developer left to found his own structure: Humanoid Origin. It was in 2021 that the studio revealed itself to the world, revealing at the same time that it was working on a brand new science fiction IP on which it seemed to have a lot of hope.

Unfortunately, the studio recently announced the end of its activity via Linkedin. In a laconic post, Humanoid Origin mentions “insufficient funding (which) makes them incapable of continuing to operate”, at the same time publishing a final artwork of their now aborted project and to which the rumor gave the title of Space Age : Parallax. The studio will therefore close its doors before even being able to unveil its very first production.

Restructurations post-COVID

The year was particularly violent in terms of layoffs and studio closures with a number of layoffs estimated between 13,000 and 14,000 since the start of the year depending on the sources: figures much more important than the nevertheless substantial 10,000 to 11,000 jobs lost last year. If this dynamic is partly explained by a reduction in workforce and costs after the industry invested massively during the COVID period, the importance of this global restructuring seems on an unprecedented scale.

Some seem to see in these changes, particularly in the case of big studios, signs of the end of the “super-blockbuster” that Ubisoft had described as quadruple A, whereas Sony spoke more of “prestige games”. It must be said that these blockbusters, which cost several tens or even hundreds of millions to produce, turn out to be risky projects which, when they fail, can seriously hurt the finances of its publisher. Latest major example to date: Concordthe failure of which has been reported at length, was a dead loss for Sony, which decided to permanently close the game’s servers as well as Firewalk, the studio behind the project.