Daedelic's bizarre Gollum apology was apparently written by ChatGPT and the studio didn't even get approval on it

pcgamer.com:

One of 2023's big disappointments was The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, a stealth-action adventure from the established German studio Daedelic. Daedelic is a publisher but also built its name on beautiful point-and-click adventures. Gollum was something of a departure for the studio, and its nature as a big licensed title in a popular genre meant it faced a new level of competition, expectation and scrutiny.

Despite one major delay, Gollum couldn't deliver. PCG's review found an enjoyably original take on the mythos that was unfortunately buried under a lacklustre game of trial-and-error. The game's PC Metacritic currently stands at 38, with the user reviews even more brutal. Gollum became the subject of a fierce backlash almost instantly, one of those circumstances where the big licence almost came to count against it. The consequences for Daedelic as a development studio would be catastrophic.

A new report from the German outlet Game Two talks to former employees of Daedelic about Gollum, and what went wrong both before and after release. It's an excellent analysis of the hubris and flawed methodologies that sometimes underpin failures like this, and while the video's in German there are English subtitles. Partly it's a development story that any industry watcher has heard before: crunch, unrealistic goals for development, and a right hand that didn't know what the left was doing.

Among this are some nuggets of pretty surprising information. Daedelic itself says that «Gollum ended up with a development budget of 15 million Euros: only a tenth of a triple-A game», which is a remarkably low budget for a game positioned as this was. If you're making a AAA stealth-action game the most obvious competition is something like