Fallen London studio says its latest game 'didn't sell particularly well', but don't worry—it's been sensible enough with its cash to avoid layoffs: 'We've had better years, but also much worse'
2023—and, unfortunately, 2024—have been dire years for industry layoffs, carrying a number so staggering and routine that you need to put the 16,000-person (and rising) loss of working talent on a chart to get a proper perspective on it.
Some would blame this all on the aftershocks of a post-Covid tech bubble's burst, but it's hard not to point at reckless over-hiring practices too—or, as Dwarf Fortress' creator Tarn Adams passionately put it earlier this week, decisions «driven by greedy, greedy people trying to make some kind of venture capital thing work out.»
Regardless, some good news came out of (appropriately-named) Failbetter games yesterday: yes, their last game didn't sell that well, and yes, they're doing fine. As announced in a state of the studio address, «we've had better years, but also much worse.»
Failbetter is known primarily for Fallen London, an old school browser RPG that's kept a cult following for over a decade, as well as games like Sunless Sea. Its latest venture, a gothic visual novel called Mask of the Rose, arrived last year—and according to our own Joshua Wolens, it was pretty dang good, netting a 78 in his Mask of the Rose review. Regrettably, however, few seem to have played it.
That's not just my own speculation, it's direct from the (inscrutable, grim, and likely wearing a bowler hat in a rainy alley somewhere) horses' mouth: «it didn't sell particularly well,» reads the post. «We don't expect to make back the money we spent developing it. And yet, we're doing alright.»
Failbetter owes its lack of card-based infrastructure collapse to avoiding expansion-hungry nonsense after the success of Sunless Skies in 2019. «In that situation, the expectation nowadays is that you hire aggressively. Perhaps in tech in particular, being profitable isn't seen as enough. A good company is one with a plan to vastly increase the value of the business, preferably at least tenfold. Some companies take a lot of risks doing that.»
However, as the studio
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