Liquid Swords, the studio behind action/adventure game Samson, will be shutting down, its founder and CEO announced today.
Christofer Sundberg revealed the news just over six months after the game launched to a 51 average score on Metacritic (I gave it a 6/10 here for Destructoid), blaming “market conditions and some bad business decisions” for the circumstances.
“Liquid Swords is closing its doors,” Sundberg said in a LinkedIn post today. “I’ve done everything I can to make this succeed, and I’m very proud of what we achieved together. It’s been a hell of a ride and a lot of fun, even when the circumstances gave us very little to laugh about. Building a studio, creating Samson and releasing it on PC and consoles took an enormous amount of work from people who cared deeply about what we were making.”
In my time with Samson, the open world crime action title showed glimpses of the game it was trying to be, but was held back by mundane and repetitive gameplay, and a whole lot of bugs. The title reached a max of 2,722 players on Steam in April. In the end, it couldn’t sell what was necessary to keep the studio in business, despite a better-received console version that launched a month ago.
“The console versions met with much greater success than the PC release,” Sundberg said. “We got them out, but that success wasn’t enough to get the company across the finish line. I can look honestly at what went wrong and still be proud of what we built.”
Sundberg, known previously for his work at Avalanche Studios on games like Just Cause, says he is “in discussions with all parties involved in Liquid Swords about how we can continue to support Samson the way the game deserves,” but it appears those who worked at the studio are now out of a job.
“To everyone who worked at Liquid Swords, our partners and everyone who supported us and played Samson: thank you,” Sundberg said. “You gave us plenty of reasons to keep fighting, and the work we did together deserves to be remembered for more than how the company ended. We make mistakes, we learn, we fall, we rise up, we move on. That’s sometimes a painful process, especially when it affects people you care about, but I refuse to give up. I never give up.”
