Starbreeze is about to crash entirely, and their previous CEO is blaming the employees for the situation…
The former Starbreeze CEO, Bo Andersson was fired in December, and Eurogamer wrote an in-depth report about the company’s situation. They learned that Andersson is blaming the developers for the company’s probably inevitable bankruptcy: „Personally though I lost all my money, my family in divorce and my kids’ custody through the toil over the last 2-3 years working 100 hour weeks for Starbreeze and keeping you devs paid and in the game. With less and fewer developers willing to put in the extra care in a product it clearly limits the possible result of enough quality in time. This is a new era and I did not leave the old one and adapt in time – my fault. It’s ok – its new time,” Andersson said.
The deputy CEO, Mikael Nermark, took Andersson’s position, and he commented the following to Eurogamer: „The core team, producers and others, worked hard and often late during the last year of production. Our goal was not to have a mandatory crunch, but when needed, specific people were asked, if they were willing and able, to finalise a feature or commit on a strictly situational level. To be absolutely clear – the whole team has a very high work ethic and we all worked hard together.”
The Walking Dead, which was developed by Payday-makers Overkill, was initially planned to launch in 2016, had weak performance and sales results, causing Starbreeze to hit the financial wall (they expected sales in the millions, only hitting hundreds of thousands of copies), and they were also hoping to succeed with the console versions. However, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One ports were „delayed indefinitely!”
„Everyone knew it [The Walking Dead] was going to tank. No matter how much you polish a turd, it’s still a turd. It was never going to get any better than where it was. It was always hacked,” an unnamed developer said. The Walking Dead was planned to use a new in-house engine called Valhalla, but it was „near unusable,” and it slowed the development down by a lot, causing Starbreeze and Overkill to switch to Unreal Engine 4. However, only „10%” of the design team knew the engine. „It’s a beta game because we made it in a year-and-a-half,” a developer said.
Starbreeze acquired Overkill in 2013, but in reality, Overkill‘s leadership took the publisher over after 2012’s Syndicate reboot not performing well. (It explains Bo and Ulf Andersson getting involved with Starbreeze.) Bo, as CEO, invested into Dead by Daylight and Raid: World War 2, but with the latter game, the publisher effectively set up a rival for Payday, as Raid was similar to it. They also put a ton of money into VR (including the now-defunct IMAX VR), not to mention the Valhalla engine’s acquisition.
Starbreeze shot itself on the foot many times with their decisions…
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