The growing avalanche of job losses in games development is too much to bear. Xbox is currently dominating the grim headlines with the closure of multiple award-winning studios, but in among the large-scale publisher waves come equally painful small team eviscerations. The latest is Warren Spector’s OtherSide Entertainment (via Game Developer), which has announced it’s letting 17 of its staff go following the cancellation of the game codenamed Argos.
According to a statement sent to Game Developer a spokesperson for the company explained, “After the cancellation of a game under development codenamed Argos, OtherSide Entertainment had to sadly say goodbye to 17 team members, effective end of May.” Saying that “in normal times” Argos could have been “a huge success,” they claimed the current “brutally challenging” games industry meant it was “unviable for now.” Some of those affected have announced that they’re now looking for work, and OtherSide noted “we cannot recommend these impacted people highly enough.”
This occurs a month after the release of budget co-op stealth-action heist game, Thick of Thieves, which received very middling reviews and extremely low player counts despite its $5 pricetag.
No god in the machine
Led by industry legends Warren Spector and Paul Neurath, both formerly of Looking Glass and in part responsible for all-time greats like Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock 2, and Deus Ex, OtherSide certainly hasn’t matched expectations since its formation in 2013. The studio’s first game was the terrible Underworld Ascendant in 2018, one of the 2015 rush of Kickstarter projects that raised $860,000 and released in a disastrously broken state. OtherSide no longer even acknowledge the game’s existence.
In the following eight years there was an on-again-off-again relationship with System Shock 3, a license now owned by Tencent, but despite still claiming involvement by 2020 in 2022 Spector said the developer was no longer working on the game. More bad news came in 2023 when Wizards of the Coast cancelled a raft of games including one OtherSide was said to be working on, and then just last month saw the lackluster launch of Thick As Thieves. That game certainly wasn’t helped by an eleventh hour genre switch from PvPvE to a 4-hour two-player co-op campaign, just a month before launch. Clearly ambitions had been hugely scaled back.
Argos: Riders on the Storm was originally revealed in 2022, said to be Spector’s triumphant return to the genre he co-created, the immersive sim, and as such there was good reason to be excited. At that time, IGN described it as Spector’s “return to AAA gaming,” but no other details were—or ever have been—revealed. We only know the project is cancelled by way of OtherSide’s statement acknowledging the job losses.
These are grueling times, and we wish the very best to those affected.
