Game studio Fireforge will be closing its doors just three days afterthe release of their first game, Ghostbusters. They filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and were liquidated after poor reception and sales of the movie tie-in. All said, they were in debt of $12 million to its principal owners and investers.
While not a company with a lot of history, they had managed to get themselves tangled in several lawsuits and controversies. They were founded in Irvine, California by an ex-Blizzard employee. It should be known that they are not table-top producer Fireforge Games. As far as this site is aware, those guys are doing fine.
Reports are coming out now that Ghostbusters was developed in under eight months as a way for Fireforge to recoup lost revenue. The game’s performance suffered for it, and it rightfully received horrid reviews. They had two never-released products in the works, funded by two massive companies. Both were designed to capitalize on the rising popularity of the MOBA genre, or multiplayer online battle arena. The first was code-named Zeus, funded by Razer, the company famous for its line of high-end gaming hardware. The other title, only known as Atlas, by Chinese publisher Tencent, owner of the producers of League of Legends, Riot Games. It is reported that Tencent owned 37% of Fireforge. As of writing, Fireforge owes Tencent 11.3 million dollars.
In 2015, Fireforge was sued by lawyer Richard Land over a complicated case. Land made his name in the industry for selling off the games and IP of now defunct 38 Studios. You may remember them as the Rhode Island-based studio responsible for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. It is now coming out that Fireforge had signed a contract to license 38 Studios’ social media platform, Helios, for 3.7 million dollars. However, it turns out they instead used that money to hire several ex-38 Studios employees to build a similar platform of their own.
Now, it turns out that the company had also crossed Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan. Tan claims that Fireforge consciously breached their contract, using the loan given to work on Zues to instead work on Tencent’s Atlas. Fireforge has since made a counter-statement, claiming that Razer had ceased funding their project, so they began work elsewhere.
The wounds are still fresh, so we here at MXDWN will update this article as new information comes out.