Gollum Dev Studio Gets Shut Down After Disastrous Launch, Publisher Kills All Internal Game Projects
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2024
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1: • Gollum Is A Shameless ...
2: www.metacritic...
3: www.videogames...
4: opencritic.com...
5: store.steampow...
6: store.steampow...
7: www.xbox.com/e...
8: steamdb.info/a...
9: • Gollum Bugs & Glitches...
10: pbs.twimg.com/...
11: www.eurogamer....
12: www.polygon.co...
13: www.videogames...
TOP PATRONS
[CIPHER]
Waning Zane
[BIG BOSS]
Devon B
- Jonathan Ball
[BOSS]
Gerardo Andrade
- Michael Redmond
- Peter Vrba
[LEGENDARY]
- BattleBladeWar
Hope the devs who were let go can find greener pastures in game dev studios with more creatively and artistically fulfilling projects...
PATREON: www.patreon.com/yongyea
TWITTER: twitter.com/yongyea
TOP PATRONS
[CIPHER]
- Waning Zane
[BIG BOSS]
- Devon B
- Jonathan Ball
[BOSS]
- Gerardo Andrade
- Michael Redmond
- Peter Vrba
[LEGENDARY]
- BattleBladeWar
Damn, got first on his own video
Those devs should never touch another game again lmao 😂😂
I guarantee you that almost all of those 16 players on the game right now are streamers or content creators.
I'll see you later on the Like A Dragon panel tonight Yong!
No way keep them far away from games
Imagine a game being so bad, it literally, in one fell swoop, assassinates your entire company
Rerez covered a few of them. One of those was The Quiet Man from Hammerhead Studios
actually it didnt. deadalic just shut down game developmetn wich is sad given the high ammount of great titles they made. the truth here is much more likely that the management team fucked up by ordering the devs to make this game. deadalics bread and butter where 2d point and click adventures and not 3d action adventures.
Sonic Boom rise of lyric.
@@Irobert1115HD akctually 🤓🤓🤓
Really not that strange in this industry. Devs sell themselves to major corporations to avoid financial death if a game flops, only to get "reorganized" if the game flops. Like this.
The sad thing is that Daedalic Entertainment wasn't actually a bad game developer. They had some of the best and funniest point and click adventures in the last decade. Their stories were original, funny, and beautifully animated. It was one of the most famous German developers a few years ago. Unfortunately, Gollum was just the completely wrong project for them to tackle.
I smell another terrible managements and executive decisions here. Just like Redfall, dev were forced to make games outside their speciality
Mhm, really sounds like a case of bad management. Maybe it was studio heads, maybe it was publisher mingling, but somwone higher up made bad choices and the rest of the studio suffered :/
deponia is a gud series
point and click and adventure games are a world apart, they should not have took it on
Having grown up with their games, this feels like the scouring of the shire.
A shame a dev studio had to shut down during these times when doing games can be brutal, but then again, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING WITH THIS ONE?
Dang it went over Forsaken levels of disaster.
@@HeroesHoshiforsaken was a functioning game with kinda ew story, but damn gollum takes the cake by being literally trash
What were they thinking ? I think I can awnser this. " release it now get the money and maaaaaaybe fix it later."
@@ladyhawk7408fix what? The problem its not that this thing has bugs or the graphical issues are gamebreaking, its that there is no game in it.
It feels like they just wanted to make a game about Gollum but they never sat down to realize the gameplay style they wanted for this thing.
idk i feel like they got what they deserved. Put out shit, get shit in return.
“Even their apology needs a patch” actually got me good what a perfect joke
This was inevitable. That studio was on suicide watch for years.
@seraphim-enjoyer Daedalic Entertainment is not known for making massive hits, they were likely looking for an excuse to kill the in house studio. This game was it.
@@Slitheringpeanut they are only knows for making good point and click adventure games for a time and then went silent
@@lesslighter Exactly, their only real 'hit' which wasn't, was Deponia. They'd been looking for a contractual 'Out' to just publish and no longer make games.
i have to disagree. dedalic was doing well enough makeing games, with a big audience in germany. a few years back there was a hostile takeover which replaced the original founders and management with a new corperated and money focused one. i just think the new owners didnt care about the games and developers. they bought the company for quick money (which worked, its a longer story).
the people who made the decisons got what they wanted, and all artists at dedalic suffered.
@@SorryforSmelling So... You're saying I was right. That it was on suicide watch for years, because the new owners wanted to just make money, not make games. Like I said.
If only consequences like these stuck for bigger developers. We would actually have some accountability in this industry.
there wouldnt even be an industry anymore lmao
@@commanderwyro4204 Oh there would be. The current one we have now is the way it is because we let it be.
@@snowfang467considering we STILL have an industry bc gamers DO vote with their wallets and so far they have been voting by paying for broken games and the studios keep going so yes. We would and still do have an industry.
@@commanderwyro4204Good, we need a flood to wipe out the rot.
Where's yongdong credibility?
The sad thing is Daedalic was really good at developing point and click adventure games. They were tasked with something they did not have the capability of completing successfully and was very evidently not given the proper budget/resources as well.
like getting mad at a fish being unable to climb a tree
That's the part that a lot of people are missing, they've made plenty of good games in the past so I imagine the devs knew this was garbage but they were forced to make and release something that they weren't equipped to make and had no passion in. The people who should lose their jobs for this won't, now they get to send the costs to people who were just doing their job.
I was wondering why this game was made, because i remember this studio for its Deponia series and the Edna/Harvey games and so on.
They were fun with plenty of love and care put in them.
So suddenly seeing them make Gollum was kind of weird.
It's sad to see this studio, which was a nice part of my childhood just close.
Emphasis on "Was". Most if not all of the original team left before gollum was released.
To be fair at that point they were mainly Daedalic by name they went trough several sales and company restructures before that.
I’m so glad the fans of LOTR are willing to stand up for quality. LOTR isn’t something to turn into easy money, it’s classic art, and should be treated with more respect than this.
But the focus groups want to turn it into a cash cow because Peter Jackson’s movies made a shit ton of money and to a focus group whenever something makes money they want more
Amazon doesn't care, one of the many reasons why I deleted my account with them. The nail in the coffin was them deactivating a person's home devices connected with the company because the home owner was accused of racism.
Meanwhile, at The Evil E.A.'s Lair...
Too late for that now, lotr is going to be milked for all its worth since the family doesnt respect the ip. Sadly we see this with so many ips
Tell that to the developers of the mobile game
On one hand, this is tragic because I can see glimpses of talent from different departments in Gollum. On the other, I'm sure the team saw this coming even before Gollum released.
Seriously, the pitch for this project should've been laughed out of the office meeting that greenlit it, whose fantasy is this?? What demographic looked at gollum and said
"Oh yes, THATS who I want to play as"
whats next? The Incredible Misadventures of JarJar Binks??
Heres some info on Daedelic Studio, because there is more than just Gollum to the companies story.
Most of you probably have never heard about Daedelic Studio prior to Gollum, thats because its a small indie studio here in Germany, that barely makes any games of their own. The pretty much only publish lesser known third party indie games. They stated multiple times, that they might go bankrupt and close the studio or shrink it, because the cash flow wasn't very great. However it wasnt always like that. A long time ago the studio actually developed some of the best point and click adventures in the gaming market, that are on the same level if not better like monkey island and had descent success, with some of the games even having great sales numbers overseas. The first game was edna breaks free, its about a crazy girl trying to escape an asylum in order to find out the truth about her situation and why she is in a cell. It even got a sequel called Harveys new eyes. And the best game is probably the Deponia series(4 Games). They developed some of my favorite games ever, they have a special place in my heart and I will honestly never forget them. Games like the Whispered world actually brought a tear to my eye. If you play those games, you will see just how much heart and struggle went into these games, the story is packing, the humor and jokes are amazing, and they have the best and most creative puzzle solving games ever. Trust me when I say, that the older games of Daedelic are actually very good and a major hidden gem. (Although Im not sure how well some of the German jokes translate into English, its a german videogame at the core after all). Definitely give those games a try. But sadly the founder of Daedelic :Jan Müller Michaeles left his studio to make his own musik brand. He was pretty much the brains and heart behind Daedelic, and was responsible for most of the best games like, Edna and harvey series, deponia series and the Whispered world. As soon as Jan left, the studio stopped developing games and focused on publishing other third party games. Then they decided to step up the game and went on to create their first real 3D game Gollum. It makes me really sad to see this studio get castrated like that, but I can't help but agree with the community, because especially with this prizing, the game is an absolute disaster. Daedelic may be gone for me, but the games from Jan Müller Michaeles stay in my heart. ♥ Give them a try pls.
I have some inkling of how you feel. It's probably similar to how I felt when Sierra and later LucasArts went under.
I ain't reading that until you figure out what paragraphs are.
I have most of their point and click games in my library and from what I can tell that they excel at, they were one of the worst development houses that could have been chosen for whatever hybrid of stealth and platforming that was expected of them this time.
It is not much different from the outlandish demands made on Telltale that went beyond their collective skills and experience before their first failure.
Thanks for the background info. I have gotten a few of these old games but haven’t gotten around to playing it yet. Will try playing someday.
I have played some of their P&Cs. There simply aren't many companies who makes games in the "The Dark Eye"-setting and both Chains of Satinav and Memoria were quite good. Personally I wasn't as much of a fan of The Whispered World, but The Night of the Rabbit had a lot of charm.
And I'm slightly miffed that apparently nobody has played the Blackguards-games. It's odd, but somehow they have managed to makes some excellent tactical RPGs.
Whoever funded this should be ashamed.
Who ever greenlight this should be ashamed
Whoever forced the developers to push it out to completion too
@@irecordwithaphone1856 yeah this sound like an executive saying "Hey we need to milk this franchise, what's a popular character that doesn't require a big budget? Gollum ! yeah I know that thing, is markeateable! here's 10000 bucks, make a game"
@@irecordwithaphone1856 without question
Who ever even came up with the idea of making this game should be ashamed
This actually, genuinely makes me really sad. Daedalic was one of the better-known German studios and has been developing really decent, smaller-scale games for a long time. These are horrible news for the German game development scene at a time it is already struggling to acquire proper public funding. They should never have taken on a project of this scale.
You mentioning they were a German studio led me to discover that they were the ones behind some of my favorite point-and-click adventure games, namely Edna & Harvey and The Night of the Rabbit. Man, this situation sucks. They made some genuinely good games. :(
@@clavicleskeletoni3638 They are, tho they were only the publisher for that game. The really troubling thing is that the federal funds for video game development have already run out for this AND next year, which is why the association of German development studios has urged the federal government to increase them. A financial failure this bad, that has lead to the closing of a pretty established studio by German standards, surely won't help their position and thus, has the potential to damage the industry in Germany as a whole.
Yeah I wanted to say exactly the same. Really sucks for german, hell I'd even say the whole european gaming industry. Sure they weren't an AAA studio but they made solid niche games. Never thought they'd fall down from grace like this.
The project really was way too big for them. Though I think their downfall already started once they got bought/sold themselves to a bigger company (??)
@@_Obey_ They were bought by BigBen/Nacon for about 60 million Dollars sometime last year, who I've not been a fan of ever since that "Sinking City" situation, where they essentially might have sold a version of the game they themselves pirated from the developers.
Receiving public funding is probably the problem. If they had to be self-sufficient like private developers in the UK, US, Japan, etc they might do a better job.
As someone who lives paycheck to paycheck, I hope the people who truly gave it their all and were passionate about what they were doing/creating will land on their feet. But this game was an embarrassment
They wont, gamers and fans have no sympathy nor mercy for them
@@francopereyra6659gamers have no mercy for corpos and management in general, the devs themselves almost never catch flak
@@filipecordeiro2867 Honestly, I can't help but feel like devs catch more flak than they should. People forget that dev teams and game designers are no longer the cowboys, the rock stars, the "can't fail" attitude people like in the 90's and early 2000's anymore. Publishers and marketing teams are in charge. That's why so many games have mandatory microtransactions, lootboxes, preorder bonus DLC, and other anti-consumer predatory bologna. From a business standpoint, it makes money, so the people in charge of money will think of that first before anything else. Devs are basically expendable.
@@filipecordeiro2867 Yeah, but the point is that gamers dont distinc between corpos/managemen and devs
Lmao they won't sorry but this is a career killer when trying to find a new job and you have to admit the last big project you were involved in was this it's not likely some other company is going to want to hire you.
There aren't many game dev studios in Germany and seeing one of the more prominent ones performing like this and getting shut down is very sad.
Oh well don’t make a garbage game then
@@JeffJeffJeffJeff33 It was a good studio. The reanimated point & click adventures and they were great.
I like it a lot actually. They made the crappiest game ever, so they deserved it.
Did they actually develop the point-and-click games or publish? Because only the development department is getting snuffed, not the company as a whole
@@MikeyJBlakeJR They developped and published, at least for their former "hits" the Deponia series and the Edna and Harvey series.
Its really sad to see the company shut down, they had made some pretty decent stuff prior to Gollum dropping, mostly Deponia, and I was hoping they would at least get a chance to rebound after this nightmare.
They made some really good games based on The Dark Eye too
Yeah, i was very sad about this news. because i did fans for their owned developed games from Edna & Harvey series, Deponia series, their Dead Eye series and my personal favorite aka The Pillars of The Earth.
I did hope they back to their nature and made what they best at.
@@rayculz maybe the devs that are laid off and some that are left will make an own studio, wouldnt be the first time that it happened xD
Since you can put the fault at least to 75% (for me even to 100%) to the management/higher ups and not the devs themselves
What a time to be alive. Decades from now, this one will be remembered alongside other greats like Big Rigs and Drake and The 99 Dragons
I mean it's already been nicknamed Gollum '06, as in, Sonic '06. We're starting strong and that was BEFORE people heard how broken it truly gets.
Big Rigs Over the Road Racing, Drake and the 99 Dragons, Ride To Hell Retribution, Sonic 06, Gollum. Truly the worst Top 5 games of all time.
Dont forget the teams of forspoken,borderlands presequel and the mass effect andromeda team,they were all canned after their first games
Heheh Imagine Dragons... And 99 at that
It became the E.T game of Modern Gaming
Can't wait for avgn to play/review it
Yikes! And I thought Forespoken had a quick time in killing its own developer studio!
I mean they didn't get destroyed, Square just absorbed their studio. The people still have their jobs.
At least Forspoken looks ok. Gollum looks like something from the PS2 era.
@@0816M3RCthat is an isult to the ps2
@@KH-nk8ryyea that’s nice of them, but studio still got shut down..
The Forspoken studio got blasted in summary, game was a flop and personnel was shuffled around, maybe to be fired in the coming weeks/months to lessen the blow, and by blow i mean recognizing that the game was not to standards
I wouldn't wish on anyone to lose their job but this was coming from a mile away. Hopefully those who tried the best they can are able to recover.
Edit: ignore the ignorance people below in the comment chain and leave them to their stupidity.
Unfortunately, the people who worked on this game had a literal death sentence above their heads... all the time they made games . . . it was to create :
*_" p o i n t n ' c l i c k 2 D g a m e s "_* ! Apparently sucessful, but for a very niche genre nowadays.
Then came a box called NACON who bought them all for dirt price, and ordered them a Fantastic Open-world, Triple-A like, based on LOTR... How the f**ck would you expect to survive from somethin' like this ?! And problem is, NACON keeps on running, and ruining other studios, this ain't the first time.
@@sirjazz5776 actually the 2d point n click games are great humor whise and with a neat art style. but try to turn that skillset into a LOTR 3d open world out of the sudden. im willing to bet that this wouldnt have happened if they whould have been allowed to make a gollum 2d point n click game.
No these developers are trash and don’t deserve to be a part of the gaming industry
Yeah you cant help but feel bad for the people who lost their jobs even though they did their best
Clearly nobody there tried their best. Let's hope they go back to working cash registers. That seems to be more their speed.
I feel so bad for anybody in that company that was honest and passionate about videogames and got f***ed up
Everytime i see Gollum in this game, it feels like he wants to say to the devs: What did you do to my precious game?😦
"look how they massacred my boi......"
This is a genuine bummer. Like the game was trash but I suspect that most of development team knew this was stinker but they get punished for the decisions of the management. I hope they can all land on their feet from this mess.
@@UsernamesHandle The team had an expertise in designing point and click games, it's similar to what happened with Arkane and Redfall, these people were never going to be able to make this game, it just wasn't in their wheelhouse.
@@LilFeralGangrelnot to mention I doubt the devs had any say on what state it released in. I'm sure the entire development team knew the game needed to be further worked on but the higher ups pushed it out because they wanted the return on their investment faster. They didn't get what they wanted and now they are surely pissed, resulting in them taking it out on the devs and blaming them completely for decisions only they could make.
@@UsernamesHandle i suspect some looked for offers as this was all going down, just in case
And the games they made before were really good. Edna&Harvey, Deponia, Shadow Tactics, Desperados (granted the last two they were the publishers of with Mimimi Productions being the devs but still). They made some genuinely incredible games. It's a real shame that this is how they end. Yeah Gollum was awful but it was a single bad game in a sea of greatness. A single mistake really shouldn't have killed the studio.
@@UsernamesHandle This is like saying a baker who specializes in desserts and was forced to change their chocolate cake midway through the process into meatloaf is a bad cook.
It is a fascinating case study, none AAA or small game devs will be forced to release at least decent games unless they want to go bankrupt, only AAA can get away with fooling people
*The sad part is that this is not what this is.*
Daedalic was known for making games. Shutting down the game dev side to focus on publishing is essentially killing the creative side that was the heart of the business once in favor of the side that makes money from others. Despite the game releasing low quality, the only side that really loses is the devs and the players. The people in charge actually won, because they are cutting huge costs. *In other words, for suits this is an unfortunate case in favor of dismantling their game dev teams to focus on whatever makes a company more money.* Because that's "safer" and more profitable. *It's essentially the Konami route.*
@@rafaelcalmon2858This actually has terrible implications. Since Daedallic was known for their 2D point and click games, and an Unity game here and there.
I've been working with Unreal for quite some time now, and some of the systems in Gollum are straight up taken from online tutorials. It was one thing to demand a 3D action game from a dev team with no previous experience in the field, but on top of that they had to use UNREAL, when they clearly didn't know how to use it. So a lot of the time in production must've been spent in training, and they clearly had a super tight deadline. It seems like the publisher side was looking for an excuse to kill the dev studio for good, because the other option would be gross incompetence from the publisher. The devs tried their best, looking at the game it shows it had effort behind it, but a kind of unexperienced effort. Limited by their schedule and knowledge.
@@leinadlinkand what higher up in studio were thinking when they decide to pay license to make game about Gollum. A character that most of the time live inside cave.
And decide to make AA or AAA game on that only few devs that has no experience in the field?
Even if the dev work in Naughty Dog or Santa Monica studio before, the project was doom to fail because higher up didn't know what they are doing
@@leinadlink From what some people have said, a lot of the developers for this game had little to no experience in game development period lol. They were hired specifically because they were cheap.
Daedalic actually had a pretty good reputation among PC gamers as they made a lot of well-liked point and click adventure games, it's sad to see them implode like this. I still have no clue of how a mid-size publisher known for smaller scale projects managed to get a license as huge as LotR tho, it's really weird.
Yeah i love Deponia series and Pillar of earth is really good
It's not, they did this to themselves. The buck stops with them.
There's been a lot of imploding, lately.
As you say, Daedelic had a great reputation. Then came the hostile takeover in 2020, where the boss was cheated out of his company for less than a measly 500k. And two years later it was again sold but for 50 Million! It's quite dreadful and probably played a huge part in how this mess happened.
@@goblincomic4522 harvey > deponia
One thing I still can't get my head around is how this game got made in the first place. Back when I was growing up in the 90s, gaming was still largely seen as a children's past time instead of a serious industry (whereas movies were seen as the real deal), so major franchise owners didn't care too much for quality control. This is why we had stuff like Superman 64 being put out all the time back then. In 2023, corporations are expected to know better than to hand their franchises to any bum-ass studio that shows up. The fact that someone responsible for a billion-dollar franchise such as LOTR okayed this project is absolutely baffling to me.
Superman 64 is the worst example to cite: DC sunk that one, Titus actually made a REALLY GOOD game before DC meddled with it and kept destroying what they have. Some of Titus' original idea survived in the PS1 prototype (yeah it was going to be multiplatform) and the prototype for the final N64 build somehow STILL plays better than the final version we ended up getting.
Superman 64 sucking, from the plot to the mechanics and lack of combat, is _all on DC meddling about what Titus couldn't make Superman do_ .
They also greenlit the Amazon show. 😁
Dadalic isn't that bad a publish actually. They had a lot of great successes under their belt.
Thing is, each of them were either 2D or point and click, most notably the Deeponia series.
Barotrauma is such a fun game. It may not be it's most popular IP, but subaquatic Space Station 13 will always be one of my favorites. : (
This is why bad games make me sad. A lot of bad decisions were made and now a lot of people are out of work. So much wasted potential, can't help feeling a little sorry for them.
What’s more depressing is that the higher ups within these tarnished gaming studios grab their golden parachute, and leave with the entire payment that could last a lifetime. In my book, higher ups will continue to repeat the same mistake with these games and continue to destroy many game studios unless the higher ups suffer the punishment heavily, in which I doubt it will happen.
But that would require regulation and a massive unionized labor effort to spread around protections our parents and their parents enjoyed, which has swiftly been taken back from us in this lifetime. Good luck to that, we aren't pulling a strike and riot scheme like France STILL is currently doing.
Worth noting that a large part of the failure for this game was not the "higher ups." It was -- as is often the case -- the product managers. There were commitments made by this group based on estimates the developers gave them. They used a Kanban-style development process which further put less emphasis on tracking the actual state of work relative to other work. Their internal release cadence used no -- as in zero -- demos during every two week review.
@@JeffNymanwow, no demos or testing done to make sure the levels and mechanics work as intended?!
Why should the rich upper management even be compensated for doing a crap job? We truly live in a world where responsibility is dead.
Happens all the time in stocks. Dickbag ceos give themselve million dollar raises as their shareholders lose everything
Thats legit sad. These devs made like, 2d puzzle exploration games before. Giving them a game as big as gollum was just setting them up for this
yeah. And those games were actually really good, so this is a sad day. Yeah Gollum was awful but this studio had a good enough track-record that I would have wanted them to get a second chance. This isn't like Blizzard or Bioware where everything they have done those past decades was one catastrophe after the other.
it works both ways they accepted the idea
@@Barney-ii1no yeah they accepted the idea.
Given thr choice of having work or not. Thats on them right?
Kinda like, why wouldnt slaves just run away, and then police killed them. Guess they liked slavery.
Get real brother
@@Barney-ii1no Studio's higher ups are not the devs, devs got the short end of the stick.
@@vVAstrAVvyour logic says that; even if you know you can't do it you should take it because, "You need work."?
Very interesting.....
I feel like gollum will forever be a scarlet letter on this company. When you release something this bad for a franchise as massive as lord of the rings, there is no way people will see your company and products and not think “oh these are the guys who made gollum.”
But the thing is they are also the guys who made Edna&Harvey, Deponia, Shadow Tactics and Desperados. Like they DO make good games.
@@EskChan19 that’s fair, but it can take one game so bad like gollum to really hurt a company’s name, even if they have a good track record. Look at Bethesda, made games like Skyrim and Fallout 3, then 76 came and now everyone is apprehensive about starfield. Not to try and defend Bethesda because 76 is a bad game, but just an example of a “scarlet letter” on a game company can lead to doubt about their ability to deliver.
@@EskChan19You're misinformed or just assuming here. Both Shadow Tactics & Desperadoes 3 were amazing but NOT developed by Daedalic. Hell they only ever published Shadow Tactics with no involvement with Desperadoes whatsoever since THQ published it. There's a big difference between a studio full on developing a game vs merely publishing a game which many seem to get confused with. So no, this Daedalic internal development studio had no involvement or have any credit with developing and them being axed has nothing to do with the future of those franchises
@@dr.bishop8915 There's also cases of the opposite, a company making such a bad game noone wants to play it but then later release an amazing game, Teyon is a good example, they made the god awful on-rails Rambo game, then later went on to make Terminator: Resistance, one of, if not the, best terminator game out there.
@@dr.bishop8915not to mention that the fan base was already polarized thanks to Fallout 4, it wasn’t an awful game but it was definitely not amazing either
Even their apology of the name of "Lord of the Rings" to "Lord of Ring" show's their ineptitude.
Whats sad is, Daedelic probably had this planned out already.
I mean, if you look at this, the dev team moved on to the next game * already *, meaning that the studio already had the green light. That, or , more likely, they were told to move on, which really says to me that the studio was already being rushed to finish gollum. Who know how much time they actually had to work on that project, and how much time they were going to be given for the next.
Idk, i could be wrong. It just feels like they wanted to shut the studio down, because games don't bring in the cash like publishing does. And we got a shit game out of the deal because of it.
Just like his son Icarus, Daedalic flew too close to the sun.
criminally underrated comment
Honestly, I just want to know what they were thinking.
The internal development team of Daedelic made some of the best point & click adventure games around. I even think p&c adventures were the only thing they ever developed themselves.
They had a comfort zone and something they were really good at. They even made some with a darker atmosphere set in the Dark Eye universe.
How do you jump from that to the crime against gaming that Gollum is?
Greedy executives forcing them outside their comfort zones. Heard it was bleeding a lot of the core devs even before gollum
I can see how some studio/people go out of their comfort zone and try something new. It's nice, sometimes.
But this one is Idiocracy. They make a game from famous IP for their first game other than point and click. Then they failed at it at fundamental level despite many developer made a decent similar games.
@@tenjenkYeah, because I’m sure this kind of game needs to be “in your comfort zone” for you to realize that maybe making this game ugly as hell is a bad idea. Or selling lore accurate voiceovers as Day 1 DLC might be a bad idea. Or designing a game where all you do is do fetch quests, stealth, and climb might be a bad idea.
Maybe quit making excuses for the devs. The truth is clearly just that they were only ever good at making low effort games and couldn’t handle making an actual game.
@Croach193 we have no idea what was driving the creation of this game internally. I suggest watching "Wha Happen?" by Matt McMuscles, there's so many ways good devs can end up having to release bad games. And usually it's because the executives fucked with it or forced them to work on something the devs KNOW they cannot realistically do. The devs don't decide what games they work on (outside of the people running the studio), or what DLC gets released...they just get told what to do.
@@PointsofDataand in some cases, releasing the awful broken game make less financial loss than canceling it.
"Even their apology needs a patch" got my weak hahaha
"even their apology needs a patch."
70 bucks for that. They didn't even bother with denuvo because even pirates wouldn't pirate that crap lol
I hope I'm not the only one who wants a "Wha Happun" on this game. Daedalic Entertainment was a personal favorite of mine when it came to point n' click games, so I'm wondering how they got a project this big and how they thought they were going to pull this. Sad times, indeed.
I'm looking at Nacon, which is to the European AA space what publishers like EA & Activision are to AAA, has had lots of failures, controversies, exploitation & accused fraud/theft w smaller studios.
I saw a video from a German RUclipsr -who allegedly has personal contacts from Daedalic Entertainment- . Apparently it was already going badly for them for years, since all the main talent left and Gollum was a final push from the new higher-ups to squeeze out some profits.
@@GreenScrapBot may i ask which youtuber it was?
@@LinUzumaki I think the video was
"Was zum Teufel ist bei Daedalic los?" by SpeckObstler
@@GreenScrapBot thanks i will look it up😄
I decided to give a look at their catalogue of games and saw they both developed and published games. Of the games they have developed a very good number of theirs do indeed have positive and very positive reviews, with just a few having mixed reviews, and upon further inspection they did mostly 2D games, often times 2D adventure games.
So this game was clearly way out of their field of expertise, and it was so astronomically bad that it effectively shut down their studio.
Yes. they were a big name in the German videogame community. Most people who worked on their well received series like Edna & Harvey, The Whispered World and Deponia have left the studio years ago.
@@GreenScrapBot Ah, so it's a ship of theseus situation: all the talent had left and this was a "new" ship with the old name?
“Even the apology needs a patch” is the starkest, deepest review I hace seen of any product
Absolutely S A V A G E.
Deepest review? Bruh, it's literally just a brief joke review
@@jimmythegamer2231you must be fun at parties
theres something beautifully ironic about greed being the death of a company making a gollum game
Gollum should be the game that every developer should look at closely and use it as a way to avoid disastrous types of games.
Sad part is that its the higher ups and the publishers suits that were probably the ones that forced this game out when it wasn't ready. I am sure that the ground level devs were very aware and non too pleased to have the game shipped out when they knew it was pretty much trash. However, its the ground level devs who are getting the punishment and losing all their jobs.
In this case, I dont think more time would have helped. I think even the devs were at fault for this one...
Welcome to capitalism.
@@skyless_moont wouldn't have sold but it wouldn't have been the worst game on Earth rn.
Happens all the time. Who ever said that capitalism was fair??? This is why these rich fuckers fear communism
Dude the game sucked and was never ready. It could've had the best graphics the best everything but if your gameplay is shit then it doesn't matter
This game is a study case. As a game dev, I want to know what went wrong, i wanna see the code base, talk to the devs, was it a skill issue or a management issue, funding or something else. Was it too ambitious or just lack of experience. It’s important to study this to understand how to not fail.
The biggest problem: The development team was known and loved for many "smaller" 2D point & click adventures. Gollum was a new step in 3D as well as Unreal Engine. The creative minds and the know-how to deal "properly" with the Unreal Engine were missing. In addition, the state funding of video games in Germany is a horror, mostly only big publishers like Ubisoft and Co get funding and the amount is a joke...
Fascinating to know. Yeah they wanted to branch out without much expertise I guess.
Thank you for commenting this. Gamers tend to not give a second thought to what happened behind the scenes so seeing this put a smile on my face. Hopefully we learn more as to why this game was shipped the way it was.
@@GermanOlle That is not the issue! Most start-up game studios do not make such bad games! This is completely a management and funding issue.
Management:
- poorly planed game (time)
- did not hired the required staff
- partnered with a poor/ unexperience publicher
- unrealistic scope of game (the $70 pricetag confirms that they were targeting a AAA game release)
Even while using stock models from Unreal Engine store anyone with no previous experience could achieve this result ... Imagine if they had to make their own came engine! This is why most Start-up Studio either:
- hire experienced Staff and directors
- first work as co-development studio
- choose a publisher which provide development support and production
- start by remastering or porting a game to game experience: There are studios like BluePoint Games which ported games for decades and their latest Demon's Soul remaked proved that they are capable of making a AAA game
Perfect topic for a What Happened episode.
I wonder how the executives approve the release before reviewing their product
They should be government regulation on how the regulation game lunches, but unfortunately, the corporations are here to defend and win lawsuits
likely not at all given that deadalics bread and butter where actually 2d point and click adventures...
@@kevingame3198what does food have to do with this? 😂
@@Tim7318-3 how many times do we have to teach you this lesson old man!
@@Tim7318-3 "Bread and Butter" is a German proverb for core buisness.
"Apology need a patch" thats how bad it is? 🤯😱😭
I was interested in this game when it was first announced, because I thought the premise and Gollum's story is very interesting and I thought it was going to be an open world game, but somehow the devs botched it.
What, you don't want to collect slave tags meander through crappy dungeons to collect more slave tags?
I was in the same boat as you honestly, but I waited because my faith in triple A games has drastically been reduced with all the terrible releases there've been over the last few years. So glad I never bothered with this one, but I'm sad, because I was looking forward to delving into the mind of my favourite LOTR character.
I look forward to Rerez reviewing this on their "It's just bad" or Matt's "What happun". Would like to know the background of the devs and their story on why this happened.
Gollum Locked Pro Skater
And angry videogame nerd talk trash on it
Or AVGN in 20 years.
I wasnt familiar with the team before this came out, but apparently they were known for some relatively obscure but none the less decent point and click games. They clearly were not equipped to develope a game like this, and that license couldn't have been cheap to get. The game might have been atrocious, but there are still people who worked on it and none of them deserved this. I hope the people can find some other place to put their abilities to work on a good game.
They were popular in some European countries like Germany
@@napoleonfeanor But not too well known around the world. That's what I meant by "relatively."
The people like the exects making the decisions that forced the game out should get canned. They probably wont.
Oh yeahcthe deponia series is their best in my opinion. Fun story and world with many interesting characters and a lot of humour.
@@napoleonfeanor Well. They are a german company so... And we germans dont really have many game companies where we can point at and say "Yea. We have these guys". Its largely all indie here, or mobile game companies. Except for crytek witch lives from the game Hunt showdown and their engine.
And Deck13 which made The Surge... But that is it mostly.
goddammit. I love daedalic's point and click stuff, it was really formative to me growing up. This is heartbreaking. Gollum was bad but I know they're more than capable of making great games. 💔
To be fair the old daedalic has long stopped working there. The experienced point and click developers have moved on and what remained was just a husk of former glory, where every last drop of goodwill and reputation has been squeezed out of the company. I honestly think the management made the call to sack in the LOTR money and get out of making games a long time ago, they had to know how bad Gollum was gonna be months before its release.
me too, the dark eye series is one of my all time favorite point and click series, I’ve been playing their games since i was a kid. It’s so depressing to see them turn out and make headlines like this. 😔
It was only that studio in name only.
Their legacy and IPs have been horded.
They had a few decent successes after the P&C era, especially in the multiplayer game department (Unrailed, Witch It, Barotrauma). So, I wouldn't have put it past them to make something decent out of this. It doesn't look like too much of a cash grab either to me, more like a heavily mismanaged project. The movie franchise of LOTR is licensed to EA and all the book-based LOTR games I know of were fine though never outstanding successes (The Hobbit, War of the Rings). If that's what they aimed for, it does not sound like an absurdly high bar.
*Correction, they published those games and did not develop them.
The emotes were a preorder bonus on consoles, I can't believe steam are actually charging money for them.
Farewell to the studio that developed one of my favorite games of all time, the incredible and unforgettable _State of Mind_ 😢
ONE GAME TO KILL THEM ALL ONE GAME TO DESTROY STUDIOS AND IN DARKNESS BIND THEM.
Its actually sad cause the studio is actually really good at what they usually do, point & click adventure/puzzle games, which we don't get enough of them, and now, even less. it's sad to lose an amazing studio cause they were hired to do something completelly different to what they usually do.
I've been so sad and disappointed about how this game was handled and the end result ofcourse. Gollum/Smeagol was my favorite characters from the Middle Earth universe since I was a kid when my uncle would ready me The Hobbit and LoTR. When Andy Serkis played him in the adaptations, his stunning portrayal brought me back to those days. When I heard they were making a game dedicated to the character, I imagined a mostly stealth oriented game along the line of Styx. What we got though...
I completely feel that the dev company is as fault because I really feel like this could have been a smash hit if handled by the right people. A smash hit that will probably never come to fruition because of the poor mishandling of this game. 😔
Even their apology needs a patch💀
Gollum's 3d model looks like it was lifted from an early 2000s game upon looking at it closely.
Wasn't he in at least one game in the 2000's? With what I recall being a much, much better model.
Unless it's from like the RTS and it was never meant to be looked at up close
The Gollum game makes Marvel's Avengers game look like a masterpiece
No
This game arguably will be in the top 10 all time worst games in all video game history. I wouldn’t go even close to that far as to say marvels avengers is in that conversation.
Marvel's avengers it's a good game. Now gfy
And I thought forespoken was bad...gollum was like "hold my one ring"
The question i have is why they think they could handle a project like this. They're known for small point and click adventure games, apparently no one at any point thought maybe we can't handle this.
When the animal clipped Gollum out of bounds I got so frustrated just seeing that. There's no way back, you have to reload. So fking annoying
For future devs thinking about making LOTR games, it's important to note this wasn't because it was LOTR. This was a game issue, the developers didn't know what they were doing.
Unfortunately, investors don't see it that way. Anything associated with the name probably won't be brought up in a few years.
@videocee Maybe. But I also think this was pretty clear publicly that it was a bad game. And there's still the new LOTR mmorpg happening. Hopefully, it will be great.
@@videoceeOn the other hand, the last series of products with the name kinda sold like hotcakes
@@videocee LotR still rides on strong shoulders from the Shadows series.
I frankly have no idea why Daedalic of all companies took upon themselves to make a LotR game priced as a AAA. They were great indie developers but didn't have this kind of money. An investor worth their salt would likely be able to consider a AAA game made by a AAA studio more than a AAA-priced game made by an indie studio with no track record of this magnitude.
@@Mystra That MMO is from Amazon though so it won't be anything more than absolutely atrocius, like every Amazon game so far.
Also the devs were actually pretty good and they have made plenty of good games in the past, so blaming it on them is just as stupid as blaming it on the franchise.
As much as it amuses me to see games like this come out that are in the spotlight for no reason except being especially terrible, I do feel bad for the people who lost their jobs just because they were assigned to a doomed project.
They are the reason it sucks
That typo on the apology says it all 😂
They couldn’t care less about LOTR and a good game
This screams of backroom shenanigans to me. Daedelic Entertainment had a great track record making Double A point and click games that won numerous accolades. Why on Earth would they decide to get out of a decade's-long comfort zone to make something Triple A on an engine they weren't familiar with in a style they hadn't done before? Someone with deeper pockets have to have either greenlit or demanded this project happen. Fairly sure this was studio murder happening behind the scenes. Someone higher up the corporate ladder wanted Daedelic's game development branch to close in favor of their publishing arm and got what they wanted.
I simply cannot imagine the thought process that leads to this game being made at all.
As a German I can tell you that there is a whole Rabbit hole behind Daedalic. They are an abusive Company that treated their developers like shit. When you know the whole story it's no wonder the game turned out to be like this
Do elaborate please. Are there any sources I could refer to? Currently, I blame Nacon for Gollum’s quality more than Dardalic.
Please write that down if you've got the time for those of us who can't go find everything they did because of a language barrier to research attempts? Thank you!
I know a lot of people won't understand that but Daedalic was probably the best German studio at least for a while.
The Harvey and Deponia games were truly great but many of the people responsible for those left and the rest was forced to move from point and click adventures to pseudo-AAA 3D games because point and click wasn't profitable enough for the higher ups
what about Crytek?
@@ulrichleukam1068what's their last famous game? I honestly lost track of them after Crysis 3.
@ulrichleukam1068 Forgot about them being based in Germany tbh but they're also very international with studios across the globe (although some got shut down or were sold).
There's a bit of a difference between the 2 in the sense that Daedalic's Point&Click games actually reflected German culture to some degree. They are probably the only games where I would prefer the German dub. Crytek is from a technical and financial standpoint as well as in regards to international influence on top but Daedalic really had its charm.
Blue Byte is probably the last german studio worth a damn by this point. They make the ANno Series, which became pretty popular with Anno 1800. They're also situated in germany, even though the games are published by Ubisoft.
@EskChan19 oh right forgot about them too 😅
imagine your game being filled with so bugs that make it so terrible, but even without the bugs its still beyond terrible
The apology needs a patch was comedy gold!
they had over 20 years of Gollum design to use as a base, and yet they failed.
Yeah but why make a Gollum game in the first place. Literally any other character in the entire LOTR universe would've been a better pick.
@@CidGuerreiro1234 maybe they hoped people had nostalgia about the 2003 hobbit game. thats the best reason i can think of.
At least we got some good memes out of this
Yeah. Meme for worst game in 2020s
And they were even planning to make a second game lmao
not even No Man's Sky needed an entire overhaul. it established its foundation fairly well but it just needed content, a LOT of content
It's so sad. I feel bad for the devs.
imagine getting your first job working on this game . Then a few months later your looking for another job , well future employer i worked on Gollum ,it was fun but a heap of crap 😬😬😬
Forspoken 🤝 Gollum
Destroying their own companies
We were saved from the, already annouced, second LotR game from that studio. What boggles my mind is why they even made this game in the first place. They were known from making adventure point and click games. Couldn't they go more in that direction with Gollum instead of that mess they did in the end?
I guess some suits just had $$$ signs in their eyes and wanted to make big bucks with a 3D LOTR game; no matter what resources they had on hand or what effort it would have required to make an actually good game.
its what happens when you have corpo's who arent part of the game industry heading game design. "its all just games right?"
Mines of Moria is a different studio, mate.
@@EarthwormShandy I'm not talking about Mines of Moria. There were rumours/talks about how the studio responsible for Gollum was supposed to do another game set in LotR universe.
@@chillax319 You said they already announced it
Or are you wrong? Like dead wrong?
Better amend that first comment, mate. Before people will see that you were wrong.
On a positive note the Angry Joe review of this game is absolutely comedy gold. 😂
Yup. The very fact that they started to fight each other on who would play next because they no longer wanted to finish the game was so very telling on just how frustrating, soul sucking and awful this game truly was.
There might be worse video games produced this year on the indie side, but this disaster will likely top the headline for worse game of the year.
Even Other Joe's Gollum costume (aka Joellum) looks better than the game's
Wish avgn would also review this next gen garbage
@@Mac_OmegalyI’d argue one of the worst games of all time too lol
This is sad. They made State of Mind, an amazing cyberpunk point and click game a few years ago. No one asked for a stupid Gollum game, why would they do this?!
"It's not a particularly good looking game."
Golum's model is infinitely worse than the one used for Shadow of Mordor... a decade ago.
I knew this game wasnt likely to be great but damn. This is insane😮
if monolith had made it, it would've been countlessly better since the had: better modules already made for gollum and orks and stuff, better voice acting, better story writing and they have experience making full on games. as far as i understand the company that made the game only did point and click games
I didn’t know Kiryu would be covering the news this session.
It's a shame. Daedalic is a bit of a household name for story-driven point & click adventures in germany. The games created with Poki, the founder, onboard are really funny and creative. I think the founder left the company a while ago. I'm happy they will continue publishing, Barotrauma and Shadow Tactics are great. But I wish they would return to their roots of original point & click games as developers and not waste money on licensing franchises.
Obviously there's no selling short how much of a disaster the launch of this game was, but seeing the whole studio get shut down is a shame. Especially since I heard they made some point and click adventure games that have their own dedicated fans.
Oh yeah Daedalic has some fun games. My favourite is the deponia series which is really good. But this type of game clearly is not in their wheelhouse. Also I heard a main person behind the studio (Poki) left the company a couple of years ago.
Dang, I’m actually super sad Daedelic shut down. Been a fan of their smaller games since the wildly weird Deponia series, sucks that they went out doing something they clearly didn’t love as much
They are not the same company. The Deponia devs already left.
I'm assuming the reason this failure happened was because the new management that came in was a greedy person who thought there was no difference between one programmer and another. Thereby making the horrible turn over during development of this game just cause things to fall completely apart.
There likely will be several more reports on this if the rumor is true.
Kinda sad cause that studio made pretty good point n clicks. Making a game like this was just sooo not in their wheelhouse.
Yong said even their apology needed a patch.😂
Unfortunate, but I didn't expect anything else.
Good for them they should give it back to Warner Bros. to make another shadow of Mordor game
Not sure I really want that either, cause they'll just start fucking patenting entire game features again.
(See the fate of the Gollum studio)
Shyamalan: What a twist!
Lmao Yong questioning the 4% after reading it is comedy gold 0:54
Considering their marketing and the way they tried to sell it, even if they are going to focus on publishing games I'm still gonna side eye anything that comes from them because of that
I remember when it was announced.
It was a very small studio and they said : when this will not get a hit the studio will close forever...
Tja, the ambition was to high from the start. It was money burning from the start 😎🔥
This is actually quite sad to see. Daedalic have made some really good games in the past, such as the Deponia games, some of the best point-and-click adventure games ever made.
Think about this: the game was so bad thar the development arm was closed, but the publisher side not only sold it at full price, but continues to sell it. If they cared at all about customers they would have canned the game before it released and any patches are just to avoid refunds for a broken product
This is where you don't want the "talent" to be scooped up by other game Co.
Even now 7/13/23 it’s $34.99. That’s wayyy too much for this!
This is making Aliens Colonial Marines look like a masterpiece.
And I quote:
_"We're going to support this game and make it better"_
Never trust this sentence
Or the phrase "We've been listening".
They should just fire the people who approved this game. Seriously, WTF were they thinking?