The Lord of the Rings: Gollum: After the Flip: Daedalic shuts down the development studio

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum started out with great ambitions, but due to a number of problems, the title became a flop. This now has dire consequences for the developer studio.

Daedalic Entertainment has announced that the development studio responsible for the recently released The Lord of the Rings: Gollum will be shutting down. At the same time, the company wants to focus on publishing games again in the future.

This restructuring comes after the failed release of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum – another title that started out with numerous problems and later caused a lot of criticism and became a flop. The developers also apologized for the state of the game in the meantime, but now have to deal with the devastating consequences of the shutdown.

While some employees could apparently be reassigned to other positions, about 25 of the more than 90 employees will lose their jobs at Daedalic as a result of the studio closing. However, the company wants to support former employees in finding new jobs and opportunities within the network.

The move also has another consequence: another video game based on The Lord of the Rings will be discontinued in the course of this and should never appear again. This has been in the works since mid-2022 and should already be published at the end of 2024. It’s not clear exactly what it was about, as Daedalic previously avoided an official announcement of the game, which was internally dubbed “It’s Magic”.

An existing BMWK database entry spoke of a game that was going to tell a story from the perspective of a character who had “never been told before”. The Lord of the Rings title had also introduced “entirely new territories”; The game world will be greatly affected by the choices of the players.