Image source: Daedalic Entertainment
Daedalic Entertainment, the company behind the critically panned game The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, has decided to close down its internal game development team. Instead, Daedalic will now focus solely on game publishing and marketing, leaving behind the in-house development efforts. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which received widespread negative reviews from both critics and gamers, will be the final project developed by Daedalic’s internal team.
Daedalic Entertainment to Focus on Game Publishing
The company has a history of publishing games developed by external teams since 2002. In 2008, Daedalic ventured into internal development, attempting to create a series of titles. Unfortunately, these games failed to achieve the desired success. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, their most high-profile title yet, suffered from numerous bugs upon release, leading to scathing criticism from reviewers. The game’s lackluster gameplay, uninteresting narrative, and poorly designed puzzles contributed to its commercial and critical failure.
Due to the game’s disastrous state at launch, Daedalic felt compelled to issue a public apology to address the technical and design issues. Despite closing down its internal development, the company has pledged to continue releasing patches for Gollum. However, the future of ongoing support for a game with such poor reception remains uncertain.
In addition to ceasing the development of its internal projects, Daedalic Entertainment has also canceled another Lord of the Rings game, which was rumored to involve magic-wielding wizards. Details about the game’s genre and storyline were scarce, but it had been in development since mid-2022. Daedalic had received €2 million in funding from Germany’s Ministry of Economics for this project, which has now been informed of its cancellation.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum’s failure is one of many instances where game developers and publishers have had to apologize for releasing titles in a subpar technical state. Given that Gollum was Daedalic’s most expensive project to date, its financial and critical failure led to the inevitable disbandment of the internal development team.
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The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is still getting a Nintendo release later this year.
