System Shock 3 studio remains silent on claims team has been laid off

Just four people now list System Shock 3’s developer as their employer on social network site LinkedIn, following claims its development team has been let go.

Earlier this month one anonymous developer suggested that OtherSide Entertainment’s Austin team was “no longer employed” and LinkedIn confirmed an exodus of senior leads, including System Shock 3’s writer & director, lead programmer, design director and more.

Since that report OtherSide has failed to respond to requests for comment and studio director Warren Spector hasn’t been active on his social media channels for almost seven weeks.

OtherSide’s official Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages haven’t been updated at all this year.

At the time of publishing, just four people, including Spector, are listed as working at OtherSide’s Texas studio on social network site LinkedIn.

One unconfirmed report from a Twitter user has claimed that OtherSide Austin’s office “has been empty for a little bit.”

https://twitter.com/Jharrisonprice/status/1229807211892879362

The System Shock 3 studio had been searching for a new publisher for much of 2019, following its separation from former partner Starbreeze in February of the same year.

Warren Spector, told VGC in May 2019 that talks were progressing with “a lot” of interested publishers. He claimed that OtherSide had enough capital to fund itself for “quite a while” and didn’t rule out the studio self-publishing the game itself, if it had to.

OtherSide Entertainment also has a studio in Boston, Massachusetts, which worked on 2018’s critically panned Underworld Ascendant.

System Shock 3 was most recently shown at GDC in March 2019, when Spector confirmed it was being made with the Unity engine.

According to an anonymous developer post (confirmed as legitimate by OtherSide’s former community manager), System Shock 3 was “critically behind” in content creation.

“The only reason I’m posting is because I saw so much confusion about the state of the company and the project I thought some first person information would be welcome,” the user wrote.

“If Starbreeze hadn’t gone into crisis I think we would’ve delivered something interesting with some fresh and innovative gameplay, but a much smaller game than what people were expecting and inevitably disappointing for a sequel to such a beloved franchise.”

The post continued: “Those high expectations drove a lot of expensive experimentation. We were a small team and knew we couldn’t compete with current immersive sims in production quality and breadth, so we had to be creative and clever and weird.

“And we were on our way to make something unique and possibly fun, but probably not what the audience was hungry for.”

The System Shock remake from Nightdive Studios remains in development and is due out this year.