League of Geeks, the Melbourne-based studio behind Armello, Solium Infernum and the loved-but-never-completed Jumplight Odyssey, is taking a break.
In a blog titled Gone Fishin’, studio leads and co-founders Trent Kusters, Blake Mizzi, and Ty Carey explained that the studio will enter a period of ‘hibernation’. Most of the company’s staff have moved on to other studios or roles in other industries, and, under the current economic pressures, it isn’t currently viable to remain open.
“With over 13 years under our belt as an entirely independent studio, and the economic situation in games being what it is right now, we have made the decision to put LoG into hibernation for the foreseeable future and take some extended time off,” reads the post.
Though ‘hibernation’ is a term used carefully, suggesting a pause rather than a complete shutdown, the future of League of Geeks is currently unclear, even to its founders.
“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.
“Now it’s time for rest, some play, and other opportunities.”
The move comes only a few weeks after another indie studio, Worldwalker Games, announced it would also go into ‘hibernation’ for similar reasons.
Kotaku Australia has reached out to Kusters to see if he had anything he’d like to add beyond what was already in the blog. We didn’t hear back by press time, but if he decides he’d like to expand on any part of the blog, we’ll update this piece.
League of Geeks games like Armello and Solium Infernum will still be supported. The former was the studio’s breakout hit and has been more or less complete for years, rotating seasonal content and keeping its players happy. It will continue to do so. Active development on Jumplight Odyssey ceased last year amid a round of significant redundancies, and there are still no plans to restart it. It will remain in its Early Access build on Steam, untouched. The much bigger question is what to do about Solium Infernum.
The blog makes no bones about its fortunes. Solium Infernum, which launched earlier this year, is a ground-up reboot of a popular grand strategy title of the same name. Think Civilization, except it’s set in Hell, and you have the wily machinations of the demonic plane to grapple with. It’s great, and the critical response was overwhelmingly positive. Unfortunately, that hasn’t translated into the kind of sales revenue that can keep the project alive in the longer term. League of Geeks will continue to release small updates for bug fixes and smaller content drops already in the pipeline, but they’ll be few and far between.
League of Geeks was one of the few Australian game studios that everyone in the industry seemed to love and admire. Former employees and other studios who’ve seen its inner workings sing its praises. Even people who’d left the company amid the redundancies didn’t have anything bad to say about the place. You have to go pretty far to find someone with a bad word to say about LoG. That, in and of itself, is remarkable, to say nothing of the high quality of the games it produced.
So, farewell (hopefully, genuinely, just for now) to League of Geeks, a cornerstone of the Australian game dev scene for a decade and a half. You will be missed.
Image: League of Geeks, Adult Swim, Kotaku Australia
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