Crisis leads OtherSide to cancel game and lay off team

Shaken by yet another operational setback, the company is now attempting to support those who were laid off. "To any studio out there that is hiring, we cannot recommend these affected individuals enough," the management wrote in a public statement. The situation is a disappointment for those who hoped for a comeback from the studio following the recent release of Thick as Thieves, a game centered on stealth and cooperative heists published by Megabit, a label of the Aonic Group. The early termination of a novel project shows that even recent partnerships do not ensure stability in this inflated market.

The cuts directly impacted 17 professionals at the end of May. The decision was made by OtherSide Entertainment shortly after leadership declared the permanent shelving of Argos, a project that was actively in production. Management used bureaucratic justifications to attempt to explain the previous failure, arguing that market conditions are "brutally challenging" and that the project became "unviable for now," though they claim that, in a normal economic situation, the game "could have been a massive success.” This rhetoric of blaming only external factors is a well-known corporate tactic to mask internal planning and development scope errors.

The company's journey has been marked by a disastrous string of bad luck and canceled projects since the release of the disappointing Underworld Ascendant. Founded in 2014 by veteran Paul Neurath, who owns the rights to the Underworld brand, the developer gained some prestige with the arrival of the legendary Warren Spector as director two years later. However, the studio has struggled to gain momentum. They spent years working on the anticipated System Shock 3, which was to be published by Starbreeze, but financial problems with that partner dried up investments in the sci-fi RPG. In 2020, the Chinese giant Tencent acquired the rights to the intellectual property, leading to layoffs and resulting in Spector's 2022 announcement that the company was completely off the project.

"Following the cancellation of a game under development codenamed Argos, OtherSide Entertainment unfortunately had to bid farewell to 17 team members, effective from the end of May," detailed the statement sent to the portal Game Developer. The track record of setbacks becomes even more disgraceful when we recall that, at the beginning of 2023, reports emerged indicating that the firm also lost a contract with Hasbro to create a game based on Dungeons and Dragons, which was ultimately discarded. Not even the developer's acquisition by the Aonic Group in the same year could stop the creative and financial bleeding of the brand, which continues to bury the talent of its professionals in an endless cycle of unmet promises.