Snowbird Games studio, noted for a series of strategies “Eador” and Blood & Gold: Caribbean! lost most of the employees.
UPDATED: We received a comment about the situation from one of the founders.
Founder of Snowbird Games
ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: On March 28, a farewell post appeared on the studio’s blog, in which it was announced that Snowbird Games was saying goodbye to the players. The message said that due to the bad reviews on “Eador. Empire” a group of investors who participated in the creation of the studio decided to dissolve most of the team.
On March 30, a new post from the new studio administration appeared there. It explained that the dissolution was due to the “unsatisfactory results” of the Eador. Empire”, as well as the development speed of “Blood & Gold: Caribbean!” is too low.” The dismissals were carried out after an independent examination of the program code of the projects and a conversation with employees.
It turned out that the team itself fulfilled all its promises on features, but:
- the engine (Warband) was chosen, which could not support high-quality models and textures and the amount of content that was in the game;
- when developing, there was no focus on any particular genre (the game tried to be both a role-playing action movie, and a simulator of naval battles, and an economic strategy);
- the game tried to attract the audience of Mount & Blade, although it had nothing to do with it and did not look like a game.
The conclusion reached by the new administration turned out to be the following: the old development team did a good job, having managed to create a large project on the old technological base. The main problem is the old management, who chose both the wrong engine and the wrong concept of the game.
Snowbird Games is not going to develop and, as we understand, support Blood & Gold: Caribbean!. She explains this by saying that “the game code represents many years of layering by different programmers, so even simple code optimization and refactoring will take many months.” Although the studio has already announced at least one patch.
The new team will make a project about naval battles already on the new engine. Most likely, on Unreal Engine 4. An unknown third-party ORGS Studio team will undertake the creation of a new project based on Warband. It is unclear what the situation is with the “Eador” series.