Earthblade Is A Different, More Painful Kind Of Cancelled

Over the past week, I have twice written about two games being cancelled that have, bluntly, made me glad. I understand the culling of a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War live-service game and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a Horizon MMO wil🙈l lead to the short term pain of wasted work and potential dev departures, but I find them to be necessary surgery. With a new report that a third of the industry is working on live-service games, it seems vital that someone, somewhere takes a high profile and expensive hit to bring the house of credit cards crashing down.

You'd think that someone would have been Sony after Concord, but with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War and Horizon, it appears to be... Sony again.

However, recent news about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the cancellation of Earthblade just makes me sad, and is a sobering reminder of the people behind the games we love. The hardest part about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Earthblade is there is no bogeyman. No rich CEO in gold chains with a sinister laugh telling studio ജheads to decrease the surplus population. No soulless trend-chasing idea made without passion. No fans being taken advantage of. Just a game that wasn't meant to be. It's hard to take.

Earthblade Is Not About Who's Right

Earthblade was announced in 2021, aiming for a 2023 launch, before its reveal at 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Game Awards in 2022 bumped it into 2024. We had heard nothing about it since, until earlier this week when Extremely OK Games confirmed it had been cancelled in December 2024 over issues with the previous game, Celeste.

You can read෴ the full details in our story of the cancellation linked previously, but essentially Celeste was made by a very small team, and that team remained to make Earthblade. After unspecified disagreements over who🌳 owned Celeste, the small team got smaller when studio co-founder Pedro Medeiros left, and thus work on Earthblade became harder, then too hard, then stopped.

We don't know, and may never know, who is in the right here, or if there even is a person in the right. IP ownership is an incredibly thorny issue, especially in independent teams where a big corporation doesn't come along and yoink it away to make Funko Pops. As Extremely OK Games stresses in its statements, it does not want its internal division to divide fans, or to demonise M𝓀edeiros for leaving and thus ending the project. In fact, while the statement is written by the team who remained (Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry), it gives specific shout-out to Medeiros' new game Neverway, suggesting little bad blood.

But ꦜit also doesn't matter. Despite ownership of Celeste clearly being a rights issue, and therefore open to public speculation and journalistic analysis, the size of the studio makes this feel more like a private disagreement between friends that has spilled into having professional ramifications. Some people fell out, and now a video game won't be made. There is no evil intention to interrogate here, no lessons for the industry to learn, nothing to take away. It's just🅰 depressing.

There Is A Human Behind Every Cancellation

Grey haired character talking in Earthblade

It's a sobering reminder of the humanity behind our games. While I stand by 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War, Horizon, and even Concord's deaths ultimately being very good for the industry, we know the latter led to mass layoffs. And 'mཧass layoffs' has become common parlance in gaming recently, with devs reduced to numbers 🐷of thousands or percentage figures. The scope is difficult to imagine sometimes.

We need to discuss them cleanly in this way - when a studio trims half its workforce, that sheer scale is the story. It can't be about Steve with a baby on the way or Mary looking after her sick father. It can't be about the people at the heart of it because there are just 🍰so many of them, and them being a statistic makes it easier to consider Concord's death a necessity. Which I still believe it was - these games will keep failing, and thus real humans will keep being statistics, until they stop.

But there is no silver lining with Earthblade. Extremely OK Games is persevering, going back to the drawing board for a smaller scale game that is more fulfilli🧸ng to make. Eventually that game will arrive, and that might be the takeaway. On a selfish level, I was interested in Earthblade and seeing what the studio could do post-Celeste, so there's disappointment in that sense. But more than that, this was a game the studio had once been passionate about, and was making its own way.

It's a different kind of soul-crushing to have than being forced to work on live-service slop, knowing it will fail, being ignored, then being fired for its unforeseen failure, which feels closer to infuriating. It's disappointing that Eaꩲrthblade won't be coming out, but there seems to be no one and nothing at fault for it. No winners here, only losers. All we can do is 👍hope Neverway and Extremely OK Games' next game picks up where Earthblade and Celeste left off.