In a strange bookend to the week, it seems another former Mass Effect senior developer's new undertaking is feeling the current industry pressure. Worlds Untold, established by NetEase Games and led by ME trilogy writer Mac Walters, is "pausing operations" until sufficient funding can be found.
Walters released a statement announcing that studio employees will be free to seek employment elsewhere as leadership attempts to find a new partner (thanks, VGC). This is quite an odd situation, as NetEase Games only established the team in November 2023, based in Canada. Walters wrote: "It's hard to find the right words for this, but I wanted to share that we've made the very difficult decision to pause operations at Worlds Untold while we search for a new partner to help bring our vision to life."
Financial certainty is in short supply these days. Fellow BioWare veteran Casey Hudson's outfit, Human Origin, announced the cancellation of its game on Monday, along with the studio's closure. Walters does leave on a somewhat positive note, so perhaps there's more to the story: "While we're pausing for now, this isn't goodbye—there's more to come, and we look forward to sharing the next chapter with you when the time is right."
Two former Mass Effect leads announcing separate studio closures in the same week is somewhat unusual. Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
[source linkedin.com, via videogameschronicle.com]
Comments 11
its not easy to start up a new team , but i'm sure there is plenty of opportunity for them. i wouldn't mind seeing sony hire some of these guys.
Everyone is always saying “indie teams will saving gaming!” but that glorifies the fact that indie teams are also struggling a lot financially, we just don’t hear about it. This is especially true in this post 2020 world where tons of gaming investments have slowed down.
I just don't get why some new indie devs thinks starting their 1st project with AAA scale is a good idea.
Why not start with a small project and if it a success they can slowly expand their project?
@PuppetMaster @Deoxyr1bose
In what way is this studio an indie team? are you guys serious?
It's going to be problematic for him to find further funding when he is already interviewed with NetEase
@Deoxyr1bose Are you high? NetEase owning a dev doesn’t make them an indie developer?
@nessisonett Tencent has shares in Larian. Larian are still technically independent. Getting finance is not the same as being owned. Arrowhead is Independent even if Helldivers 2 was financed by Playstation. Another one is Dave the Diver which was financed by Krafton.
@breakneck None of the studios you’ve named are indie devs. None of the games produced by those devs are indie games. I’d love to see them even try to pretend to be indie devs in the presence of Localthunk, ConcernedApe or Poncle.
@nessisonett I'm just saying the term indie has no meaning anymore. there is no definitive meaning for it. Because by that logic any game that has received funding or publishing help from Devolver Digital or Annapurna are not indie.
@breakneck If a game’s development is funded by a billion dollar company then it’s clearly not an indie game. The difference in risk for developers is gargantuan. I have no idea how self-funded devs do it.
@PuppetMaster I agree, if crowd funding sure, but for some reason they go 'we can't let our prior budget scale go' it's just hilarious. As if the status/realisation hasn't hit them because they were too comfortable with their prior access to things and go 'freedom'.
But forget the decisions and money they could waste if they changed their minds themselves besides the publisher demands and don't understand how much money that costs for the consequences. It doesn't require an accountant to tell them that. But they don't want to start small or medium sized again either, when in some cases they should and scale back up but don't have patience of time for it.
They have the brains for following trends (if they pay that much attention and don't make a generic product as well from that or are only successor and continuation without the license and no chances for people to say no overseeing them)/'what extent of tools and creativity' or the ability to form a studio but forget oh we don't have a publisher interested enough or the budget resources to keep our project going as an Indie of this scale/studio afloat and we went back and forth on it, no we ran out of money, oops.
They just don't think.
Like trying something new like No Man's Sky or Nightingale as different genres/scale is risky but Nightingale likely going off of the Mass Effect Andromeda procedural generation (they abandoned but wanted to further up on that in another project) them going we will finally get a chance to do that but yet seem to not understand the survival community at all and think early access is a safeguard when in some cases it's not and people still have impressions of what other games offer.
That or compared to Yooka Laylee, Calisto, Bloodstained and others as successors without the license and less of a publisher saying change this and that, we can't continue that IP and so on factors whether we gamers or the staff like it or not, or we as the publisher/execs can give money for you to do this.
But they can't have not known oh we had this much money and besides the publisher direction differences, we forgot to transition to our Indie status now and what they actually means. They get too ambitious and don't scale their projects to match. Too much publisher comfort money mindset I assume still.
Sigh. How did they not think.
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