Holy moly!
More 2023 doom and gloom in the danish games industry.
Campfire Cabal is shutting down as part of the Embracer Group restructuring.
IGN: Embracer Group has shut down Campfire Cabal as the company begins closing down some of its development studios after announcing a few months back that a deal worth $2 billion fell through.
https://www.ign.com/articles/embracer-g ... fire-cabal
Source LinkedIN post
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bruno-ch ... er_desktop
As always! Good luck to everybody affected! Sad to hear the latest news.
I have a bunch (at least six) former colleges at the now former Campfire Cabal.
(A mix of peeps from my days at Massive, Logic Artists and PortaPlay)
The last numbers I can see the studio was 17 employees. Probably not 100% up to date number.
If more closures will touch the Danish games industry remains to be seen. Crossing fingers this is the only company. But honestly not 100% confident this will be the only one affected. I see perhaps 1-3 other potential candidates who is not really in the big performing league. But let's see! Crossing fingers!
Campfire Cabal is a quite new studio that never shipped any titles but was rumored to working on new title in the Expeditions series.
Adding: should be mentioned that the studio was an off_shoot from Logic Artists, original creators of the Expeditions series with some of the original team present.
Also the studio to my knowledge was very well funded through THQ Nordic. The studio just turned 1 year old a few weeks ago.
So in short, a young, expensive studio, not making money. In a world of hard numbers it was sadly a reasonable choice for Embracer/THQ. The last game 'Expeditions: Rome' actually seems to have sold really well! (Expedition: Viking also)
But Campfire does not own the IP. So who knows if this will be the end of the Expeditions series? Perhaps some years down the line THQ 'could' pick it up again if the financial climate has improved. Only time will tell. But not too optimistic here. For now it is the end of line for Campfire Cabal in this run.
RIP Campfire!
Again good luck out there!
Small update:
Their new project was never revealed. I hope we will see a few glimpses in portfolios in the near future.
So far the only thing besides the website to grace the world was the studio reveal video containing Expeditions: Rome assets. Not sure if it was supposed to be a new Rome game?! Probably not. most likely a 'function of early with too little time' on the studio announcement.
The former Logic Artists team has historically been hit by a lot of cancelled projects like:
'Divinity: Fallen Heroes', 'Bruce' and 'Time Guards'.
But has always been bouncing back. Let's hope another bounce back will happen.
Meanwhile the other half of the Logic Artists team lives on in Dynasty Studios.