Gollum and the consequences: The Hamburg game publisher Daedalic Entertainment is giving up internal game development.

Daedalic Entertainment GmbH, based in Hamburg, will in future focus on publishing, i.e. licensing, marketing and sales. The existing range includes, for example, Unrailed , Barotrauma , Inkulinati, Witch It and Shadow Tactics . "Eight promising releases" are in preparation for the current financial year alone .

At the same time, games will no longer be produced in the company's own development department at the Hamburg site. In a statement distributed on Friday afternoon, available to GamesWirtschaft, there is talk of a “difficult turning point” , which is also seen as “a new beginning in the long history of Daedalic Entertainment” .

When asked, Daedalic confirmed that 25 of the more than 90 employees are affected. Management said: “We value each and every member of our team and it is important to us that the transition goes as smoothly as possible. Therefore, we will support our former employees in finding new opportunities within our network.”

As part of the restructuring, work on another The Lord of the Rings game , which Daedalic Entertainment has been working on since mid-2022, will also be stopped. The Ministry of Economics (BMWK) has promised subsidies of more than €2 million for the project, which should appear at the end of 2024. Licensor: Middle-Earth Enterprises, a division of Embracer Group . According to Daedalic, the BMWK has already been informed.

The Surviving Deponia project announced in June is being developed by external studio AtomicTorch and is therefore not affected.

The team led by Carsten Fichtelmann and Stephan Harms has received numerous awards since 2007 for productions such as the Deponia series, Edna breaks out , The Whispered World and The Long Journey Home . Most recently, however, the Daedalic in-house developments were not under a good star: The novel adaptation Die Pillars of the Earth ( The Pillars of the Earth ), which was published in 2017, flopped, as did the strategy game A Year of Rain, which was discontinued prematurely . The two studio branches in North Rhine-Westphalia and Munich were already closed at the end of 2020.

After multiple postponements, the most complex and expensive Daedalic project for PC, PlayStation and Xbox to date was released in May 2023: The Lord of the Rings: Gollum based on the Tolkien fantasy saga. However, the content and technical condition met neither internal nor external requirements. The studio felt compelled to issue a public apology .

Even if The Lord of the Rings: Gollum did not meet expectations, one is "very grateful for the time and the instructive experience." Another patch is currently being worked on.

Since April 2022, Daedalic Entertainment has belonged to the French publisher Nacon, which paid €53 million for the Hamburg game developer ( background / column ).