Molten Games, the studio formed by former Blizzard, Relic Entertainment and Sony Online Entertainment veterans, has shut down last week, with the last day for employees being on March 24th, which they lost funding and canceled their game, Project Blunderbuss.
Molten Games was formed in July 2013 and they were working on Project Blunderbuss, which was a free-to-play online triple-A game which was funded through a multi-million dollar investment from Guild Wars publisher NCSoft. If they were to be able to continue, the game would have released on August 2015.
With a meeting happening that Monday morning, the studio that was made of about 60 people learned from the executives that Molten Games was closing and they were let go. They were given until noon to be out of the San Diego office. Which with this news comes out of no where, when feedback was positive.
Though with this news, the studio executives have tried to help former Molten Games’ employees with finding work, connect with recruiters and contacting the former employees by email with leads. A job fair was brought to the studio, which representatives from Amazon Game Studios, Blizzard and Riot Games were there. There are some hopes to find a new source of funding, but currently there are no backers yet.
“I had the pleasure of art directing an amazing team on Project Blunderbuss at Molten Games,” Art Director Billy Ahlswede wrote. “The project was cancelled but here is the footage of that game as it stands.”
Molten Games’ Director of Technology Joshua Kriegshauser also linked to an Alpha gameplay video on his Twitter on March 29. Another tweet by Kriegshauser contains a picture of bulletin board at Molten Games, which was a green index card saying “Need more funding!!”
The videos above were from a recent Vertical Slice build of the game, which was completed towards the end of January and beginning of February.