Gollum dev Daedalic decides to stick with publishing games only

It’s no surprise that Daedalic Entertainment had to make some changes to their company, including layoffs, in the wake of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum’s disastrous release.

Unfortunately, the recently released Gollum-focused game did not do super well. Metacritic scores from reviews prop this below a 40 across the board, as of writing this. User reviews are even less favorable with the highest at a 2.2 for the PC version and as low as 1.1 for the PlayStation 5. 

Although the game’s story and premise are faithful to the source material, players complain of an undercooked game, riddled with bugs and graphics issues. 

Now that the dust has settled from the game’s launch, Daedalic is unfortunately ending their side of game development, according to Games Wirtschaft. They plan to stick to only publishing games, which they generally do very well. 

Sadly, the Deponia developer has been axed entirely. This meant layoffs from the dev studio. The total layoffs are, reportedly, around 25. But, the entire company housed 90 people total. So, that was a huge chunk of their workforce.

Even though the company had developed quite a few titles over the years themselves, they had only recently taken to the Lord of the Rings franchise. They put aside all other IPs, as the last game they released prior to Gollum was in 2020. 

It was also reported that after Lord of the Rings: Gollum, they were in the process of development of a second Lord of the Rings video game. That has since been canceled with the studio's dissolution. 

Our condolences go out to those affected by the layoffs.

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