The situation with Dead Island 2 and developer Yager took another turn today as the company announced it's filing for insolvency. Yager Productions, the team formed to work on the zombie sequel, can't pay the money it owes to debtors. "At the moment, there are different options to be assessed while wages for employees have been secured for the upcoming months," a company statement reads. The filing is a direct result of being removed from Dead Island 2's development, managing director Timo Ullmann writes. Insolvency helps protect the company's staff and will allow "time to sort out the best options for reogranizing this entity," he says. The rest of Yager, including the team working on the sci-fi, ship-to-ship combat game Dreadnought are in the clear however and are "independent and remain unaffected" by today's news.
This isn't the first time a European developer (or a gaming company) has filed for insolvency, but the details here make it a bit more interesting. Yager formed a separate company to work on Dead Island 2, and you could infer that it did so because it had an idea the deal might go south from the outset. The studio proper's been around for awhile but only really has one hit to its name, Spec Ops: The Line.
Publisher Deep Silver, on the other hand, picked up a ton of properties from the THQ bankruptcy sale but aside from developer Volition's Grand-Theft-Auto-without-the-boring-bullshit Saint's Row series and apocalyptic shooter franchise Metro, hasn't had a ton of critical success. The company also went through some strife with Homefront: The Revolution when developer Crytek was faced serious financial troubles. That ended withDeep Silver buying not only the Homefront property, but also the team at Crytek London (the studio working on The Revolution) and making it an internal studio.
The road to AAA game releases is paved with good intentions, I guess.
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