11 bit studios cancels a game in development for over six years and makes redundancies
, by Thibaut
This 2024 ends just as it began - with mass redundancies. This time, it's 11 bit studios the company concerned, and has announced a cancellation of one of its projects too.
The company responsible for Frostpunk 2 has announced that it's halting development of Project 8, which has been going on since 2018. The press release states that, as of September 30, there were 37 people working on the title, though we don't know the number of employees that have been made redundant. All in all, Project 8 cost the Polish company 11.3 million euros.
All this can be explained by a chaotic development largely shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic. While the game was improving in some areas, other aspects of the game didn't. This caused the project to be delayed time after time and the budget allocated to the project kept growing and growing.
Everything came to a head during the final production phase, culminating in "an in-depth evaluation" that revealed a number of unresolved issues that would need further budget to be resolved. What's more, the company also deemed the project not suited to the current video game market. Taken together, all these factors led to the game being cancelled.
Source: ir.11bitstudios.com