Warren Spector studio says it’s ‘still involved’ with System Shock 3 after Tencent swoop

OtherSide Entertainment has said it will still be involved in System Shock 3 development, after the rights to the game were picked up by Chinese tech giant Tencent last month.

After a long period of silence and an exodus of key staff, the Austin, Texas-based studio provided an update in May with a vaguely worded statement revealing that Tencent would be “taking the System Shock franchise forward”.

However, the statement did not make clear if OtherSide – which at the time of publishing has just three people listed as working in its Texas studio on LinkedIn – would continue to be involved in System Shock 3’s creation.

In a new message published this weekend, OtherSide’s community manager Alyssa Marshall claimed: “We are still involved, but we can’t speak on it much further than that at this point in time. As we are allowed to make more information public, we will do so.”

System Shock 3’s developer had been searching for new investment for much of 2019, following its separation from former partner Starbreeze in February of the same year.

Creative director Warren Spector told VGC in May 2019 that talks were progressing with “a lot” of interested publishers and that OtherSide had enough capital to fund itself for “quite a while.”

However, the Otherside Austin studio appeared to be in trouble this year when an anonymous developer claimed its development team was “no longer employed” and LinkedIn confirmed an exodus of senior leads.

Tencent is Asia’s second-biggest company by market value ($490bn) and has invested in more than 800 companies including Epic Games, Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft.

System Shock 3 is being developed under license from Vancouver-based Night Dive Studios, which owns the rights to the System Shock franchise.