Just six months after laying off more than half its staff and pausing work on its current project, Armello and Solium Infernum developer League of Geeks has announced that the studio is going into "hibernation" for the foreseeable future, and may not return.
League of Geeks said in December 2023 that a confluence of factors including "rapidly rising operation costs, a weakening [Australian dollar], poor early access sales, and the unprecedented withdrawal of funding opportunities across the industry" had forced it to lay off more than 50% of its employees. The launch of the turn-based grand strategy game Solium Infernum, which came out in February 2024, was not impacted, but plans for a full release of League of Geeks' next game, Jumplight Odyssey, were put on hold "indefinitely."
The situation has clearly not improved since then, as League of Geeks co-founders Trent Kusters, Blake Mizzi, and Ty Carey "have made the decision to put LoG into hibernation for the foreseeable future and take some extended time off."
"The vast majority of our team have moved on to exciting new endeavours and those who remain are going to take a well deserved break over the next few months," they wrote.
"We’re not sure when (or if) we will resurrect this great beast, but we’re incredibly proud of all we’ve achieved, both in the experiences we’ve crafted together, the great developers who made LoG a world-class development environment, the peers we inspired along the way, and of course, those community members who believed in what we made, how we made it, and supported us fiercely in those convictions."
League of Geeks' games "will remain online and will be supported during this period," but further development isn't in the cards. Armello, which has been out since 2015, "will continue to cruise along as it has for the past few years," and work on the Armello board game will continue uninterrupted. Solium Infernum, unfortunately, did not sell well enough to enable further development or the creation of DLC, although some bug fixes and "minor content" updates are expected.
As for Jumplight Odyssey, League of Geeks has been unable to secure investment for the game, and so it will remain "on hiatus." The team is still aiming to bring it out of early access sometime within the next 12 months, but added that it "is unlikely to be the fully realised v1.0 release we had originally planned, though we will try to find some way to tuck the game in with our limited, remaining resources."
Things are kinda *wild* in videogames right now, so we're gonna take a little break over here at LoG. See ya on the other side! 👋😴More info: https://t.co/XzE7E2kdeW pic.twitter.com/lOFvfYBm02June 12, 2024
It's a very positive spin—the Jumplight Odyssey development update goes so far as to refer to it as "taking a much needed break for the next few months," which actually sounds pretty nice—but it's clearly an unhappy and unwanted situation. League of Geeks' message explicitly notes "the economic situation in games" as the driving force behind the closure, and uncertainty about whether the studio will ever return to action suggests to me, at least, that this isn't a well-earned sabbatical, but rather an unavoidable consequence of a massive contraction that's absolutely decimated the videogame industry.
The League of Geeks co-founders alluded to that malaise in their conclusion: "Makin’ videogames is hard, excruciatingly hard these past few years, but the smart, lovely people we got to do it with, both inside LoG and out, made this crazy business worth it every single day. For our industry friends, we’re around. Let’s chat. <3"
