The developers have had a bit of a troubled time lately, announcing a brand new game and then having to cancel it the same day after laying off more than half of its staff.
Flaming Fowl is a studio based in Guildford, UK, that was opened in 2016 by developers who left Microsoft (and Lionhead Studios). Their first game was Fable Fortune, a card game based on the Fable license, and they released a hit game, Gloomhaven, in 2021. On Tuesday, they announced their next project, Ironmarked, which already had a demo on Steam, but is on hiatus due to the unusual financial situation in the gaming industry, and they are asking to be put on the wish list to gauge interest and resubmit the concept to a publisher if the industry recovers in the future…
Flaming Fowl CEO Craig Oman told VGC that they had to stop development on Ironmarked after their publisher cut them off last summer. They had been self-funding development for almost a year and had tried and failed with over thirty publishers, forcing them to stop development and lay off over half of their staff!
“We had been working on the game for over a year. We had a publisher, but they pulled out around June last year, and we’ve been self-funding since August. We’ve been pitching to publishers since then, but they’ve all said ‘the game, the team looks great, but we’re not signing anything right now’. I think that’s partly because we’re a mid-sized game. Budget wise, we were originally pitching at around £5 million, but it just seemed like there was very little opportunity in that ballpark. People were either looking to do things for a few hundred grand or up into the £20-40 million range. As soon as we finished Gloomhaven, we signed Ironmarked. We had several offers. But then a year and a half later, we went back to a lot of the same publishers and they said they weren’t looking for projects like that anymore.
I know people who tried to start studios in the last 9 months and it was impossible for them. When Lionhead shut down, that was the end of the crowdfunding craze, [and] even we didn’t reach our goal on Kickstarter. Friday was the last day for most of the people in the company. We’re down to about 9 people now, out of about 30 people we were working with. I just hope they all find work quickly because that’s the really painful part. I’ve been in the industry a long time. I’ve been through layoffs and it usually leads to something better. There’s always that opportunity to discover and you’re forced to think about what you want to do next. We’re losing game projects, we’re losing studios, we’re losing people: people are going to move on to other industries. If it’s going to be like this, developers are going to move to other industries that are more stable,” Oman said.
The reason Oman released the Ironmarked demo after it was canceled was because he had experience working on canceled projects at Lionhead. B.C. (adventure game), Project Milo (Kinect), and Fable Legends were all canceled. “I just wanted the game to see the light of day. I’ve been in the industry a long time and there have been so many times where projects have been put on hold and never come back. I really don’t want it to be another one of those games that never comes out and only a handful of people ever know about it. I think the way to resurrect this project is for us to generate enough wishlists that we can go to a publisher and say, “Here’s some data that shows this game will do what you want it to do.
We are very clear in the messaging in the demo that the project has been put on hold due to the financial situation in the industry. If players want to help bring it back to life, the best way to do that is to create a wishlist for it on Steam. Wishlists are a very important thing for anyone trying to get a game on Steam. It’s a metric you can go to publishers with that gives them a clear indication of the market you can tap into… they’re just so risk-averse,” Oman added.
He’s being honest, and that’s to be commended.
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