6 years after Kickstarter, Orphan Age dev Studio Black Flag shuts without a release

Game development is a complicated beast, a constant challenge to get funding and for Studio Black Flag who were building the promising looking Orphan Age it's all over. A game I covered all the way back in 2018 with their Kickstarter, when the developer was confident on it having Linux support.

Speaking in a fresh announcement on Steam the developer put it very bluntly:

Dropping the nautical jargon for clarity, the last few months we’ve been going through bankruptcy procedures in France. This started when communication broke down between us and our publisher, leading to payments not continuing. Alas, with our publisher not continuing funding and no other sources of continued funding to finalize the game, the French government has elected to shut down the studio effective immediately. (Like at the end of the work day today we cannot legally continue working.)

Going by the date, they shut as of October 2nd.

To make matters worse when going through the Kickstarter they originally stressed how they "tried to work with publishers, but we never found a compromise that respected Orphan Age's DNA". Clearly they found one, but this is where it gets messier. In the FAQ at the bottom of the announcement it seems their publishing agreement handed over all of the rights of the game noting "I’m not able to get into the specifics of our contract with our publisher, but we simply do not have ownership over Orphan Age in a way that would allow us to shop it to another publisher.".

It might not be the complete end for the game since the publisher could continue it but it's now entirely out of the hands of Studio Black Flag.

Brutal, but a reminder that there's a lot of bad publisher contracts out there, where like this you hand over all your rights just to get the money. The developer has not named the publisher involved.

It's also a reminder that a lot of Kickstarter and other crowdfunding campaigns aren't nearly enough for a developer to fund a full game. Which is why a lot of them also end up with a publisher.