Inflexion Games is closing its UK office, laying off staff and restructuring its main Canadian studio after failing to achieve commercial success with its Victorian survival game Nightingale. At least 22 people were reportedly fired.
Nightingale launched in early access in February this year. We said at the time that it had significant charm but significant flaws, until Ed ultimately summed it up as “a numbers game disguised as a gaslight survival game.” The developers soon treated the early access version to a comprehensive overhaul, shifting attention away from procedurally generated landscapes and focusing on “hand-crafted” stories. But it wasn’t enough to keep the wolf away from the door.
In a social media update this week, Inflexion CEO Aaryn Flynn writes that “like many other studios over the last few years, we were hit with the harsh realities of the industry and after exploring all possible options, we had to make the difficult decision to lay off some of our extraordinary and talented team members.” The game’s early access launch, he adds, “was not commercially successful enough to continue development at our studio’s previous size.”
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Reports that Inflexion is closing its UK branch began circulating last week following developer posts on LinkedIn. This was reported by an anonymous source in the studio GamesIndustry.biz internal correspondence shows that at least 22 people were dismissed.
Flynn is the former CEO of BioWare. He founded Inflexion in 2018 as part of Improbable, which sold the studio to Tencent in 2022. In February this year, Flynn talked to me about the difficulties of creating a up-to-date online survival builder like Nightingale in the face of “evergreen” giants like Fortnite and Minecraft. I certainly don’t like the chance of anyone taking on these games, but again, Nightingale launched with some obvious problems, especially with an interface as baroque as the setting.
As a fan of Carrollian fantasy and Tarot cards, I still hope that Inflexion can reverse this, but it won’t be of any operate to people who have lost their jobs. If you are among them, good luck.
