‘It’s been really painful’: Ex-Lionhead devs explain why they’ve announced, and shelved, a new game

An independent UK developer says it’s been forced to announce and postpone its game on the same day, and lay off more than half of its staff, due to the sharp downturn in investment in the games industry.

Flaming Fowl is a Guildford, UK-based developer, founded in 2016 by veterans of Microsoft’s closed Lionhead Studios. Its first game licensed the Fable franchise for card game Fable Fortune. It followed this up in 2021 with the critically acclaimed strategy title Gloomhaven.

On Tuesday, it announced deckbuilding strategy game Ironmarked. A demo has been released on Steam, but the studio says development has already been put on hold due to “the unusual financial situation currently affecting the video games industry”.

It asks that anyone who enjoys the Ironmarked demo Wishlist it on Steam, “as this will allow us to gauge interest and help us re-pitch the game once the industry has recovered somewhat in the future.”

CEO Craig Oman told VGC that Flaming Fowl had been forced to shelve Ironmarked after the game was unexpectedly dropped by its publisher last summer.

After nearly a year of self-funding development and unsuccessfully pitching the game to more than 30 publishers, Oman said the company was recently forced to end production and lay off more than half of its employees.

“We’ve been working on the game for over a year,” he explained. “We had a publisher, but they pulled out last year around June, and we’ve been self-funding since August. We’ve been pitching to publishers since then, but they all said, ‘the game looks great, the team looks great, but we’re not signing anything right now’.

“I think it’s partly because we’re a mid-tier size game,” he added. “Budget wise, we were originally pitching at around £5 million, but it just seemed like there was very little opportunity in that ballpark. People were either looking to sign stuff for a few hundred grand, or up to the £20-40 million range.”

Oman said the environment for developers trying to get their games funded is vastly different from a few years ago. “As soon as we finished Gloomhaven, we signed Ironmarked,” he said. “We had multiple offers. But then a year and half later, we’ve gone back to a lot of the same publishers and they say they’re no longer looking for projects like this.”

Over the past 18 months, there’s been a sharp downturn in investment in the game industry, influenced by the tough global economic situation, and the current games industry crisis which has seen thousands of redundancies.

A recent GI.biz investigation described the situation as “a perfect storm”, with publishers and investors now being more cautious than ever about the games they sign.

For Flaming Fowl, its employees have felt the real cost of the industry’s purse strings tightening, with many of them having lost their jobs. Oman said the remaining team members have given themselves until the end of the year to release a new small, self-funded strategy title.

“I know people who have tried to start studios in the last nine months and it’s been impossible for them. When Lionhead closed, that was the tail end of the crowdfunding craze, [and] even we didn’t get our target via Kickstarter.”

“Friday was the last day for most of the people at the company. We’re down to about nine people now, from around 30 people we were working with. It’s been difficult… yeah. I just hope they all find work quickly, because that’s the really painful thing.

“I’ve worked in the industry for a long time. I’ve gone through redundancies, and it typically always leads to something better. There’s always that opportunity to discover and you’re forced to think about what you want to do next.”

Although Oman is hopeful affected employees can bounce back from their redundancies, he admits that the industry environment is very different from when he was laid off as part of the Lionhead closure in 2016. Shortly after, Oman and a few others formed Flaming Fowl, secured a deal for the Fable license, and part-crowdfunded the project.

“I’d say it’s nearly impossible today [to do what we did],” he said. “I know people who have tried to start studios in the last nine months and it’s been impossible for them. When Lionhead closed, that was the tail end of the crowdfunding craze, [and] even we didn’t get our target via Kickstarter.”

CEO and industry leaders have predicted the painful situation in the games industry could last for up to two years. According to Oman, if the situation does continue, the damage to the industry and medium could last much longer than that.

“We’re losing game projects, we’re going to lose studios, we’re going to lose people: people are going to move to different industries. If this is what it’s going to be like, developers are going to move elsewhere to more stable industries.”

‘I just wanted the game to see the light of day’

Oman said it was partly his experience working on cancelled projects at Lionhead that led to him deciding to release an Ironmarked demo, even after the project had been shelved.

As is typical for any large studio, Lionhead canned several projects over the years, notably Xbox adventure game B.C., Kinect title Project Milo, and what would have been its final title, Fable Legends.

“I just wanted to the game to see the light of day,” Oman explained. “I’ve worked in the industry for a long time, and there’s been so many times projects have been put on ice and never come back. I really don’t want it to be another one of these game that never come out and only a handful of people ever know about them.”

The CEO said that while it currently looks unlikely that Ironmarked could be resurrected, players submitting Wishlists on Steam will give it a better chance of one day returning to full production.

“I think the path to resurrection for that project is going to be us generating enough Wishlists to be able to go to a publisher and go, ‘here’s some data that shows that this game will do what you want it to’,” he said.

Further reading

16

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“We’re being very clear in the messaging in the demo that the project has been put on hold because of the financial situation in the industry. If players want to help bring it back to life, then the best thing to do is to Wishlist it on Steam.

“Wishlists are a hugely important thing for anyone trying to launch a game on Steam. It’s a metric you can go to publishers with that gives them a clear indication of the market you can tap into… they’re just so risk averse.”