Barnaul studio Stargaze, known for the Beholder series of games, has almost completely left its former owner — Alawar. Now she is one of the internal teams of Playrix.
Beholder
So far, this is unofficial information. However , her in a private conversation with App2Top.ru Two independent sources confirmed it: an Alawar employee and an interlocutor from Stargaze.
The first noted that “the Novosibirsk producer and the vast majority of the Barnaul division of Alawar have moved to Playrix. Now they are their internal development studio.”
The second source stated that “not only the team that developed Beholder has left, but in general the entire Stargaze (with the exception, if I’m not mistaken, of a couple of employees).”
Alawar founder Alexander Lyskovsky has not yet responded to a request for comment. As for Playrix, its official representative said that the company would refrain from commenting.
The Telegram channel What is IT?, dedicated to the IT business in Siberia, was the first to report on the incident. According to his information, the situation is very painful for Alawar. The Stargaze studio, which has been part of Alawar since 2007, allegedly remained the last production asset of the Novosibirsk publisher. Without it, the company may close.
Channel sources (who they are, App2Top.ru he does not know, so he cannot vouch for their authenticity) they say that the developers changed the owner “because of the constant failures of Alawar’s top management in the last two years.”
They also note that the leadership of Alawar is allegedly in a panic. In addition to the fact that they no longer have production facilities, two more factors are superimposed: Alawar managed to attract and, possibly, partially spend the investments attracted to Stargaze, plus a new game from the Watchers studio (an isometric analogue of Fortnite) was released the other day, which now allegedly remains without support.
Note, if you look from the outside, then in the last two or three years Alawar as a publisher has shown itself well on Steam. He has released seven projects during this time. Most of them have good grades and a high level of production. Also, most of the recent games can be called, based on the size of their audience, successful by indie standards. For example, according to SteamSpy, the number of Beholder owners is more than 500 thousand, and Beholder 2 and Do Not Feed the Monkeys have more than 100 thousand.
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