They’re toast. In a nutshell: They had filed for insolvency in early January after having amassed debts of almost 25 Mio. Euro. Today the administrator announced that no investor was willing to provide cash to keep the company going. They’ve now switched to a standard bancryptcy proceeding, meaning that some of the franchises/assets may find a new owner now. (Before you ask: They do not own the Gothic brand.)
What IP do they own that is worth mentioning?
The Guild?
Spellforce, The Guild…
They did acquire Dreamcatcher, didn’t they? If so, there’s also Painkiller et al.
I never much cared for their games, but they were all right
I’m not sure what they own versus have sold off, but didn’t they buy Dreamcatcher Games? There had to have been several through them, at least.
edit - too slow
Pff, the Painkiller IP hasn’t been worth shit since PCF stopped developing it.
I love market forces at work. Jowood was a horrible publisher.
They deserve to die out and have their families go hungry for not patching Silent Storm to play on a modern PC. Thus is the price of their perfidy.
The level of disparity in reactions here, between whenever an American publisher / developer has to can its entire staff, and whenever some other does the same, is simply frigthening.
Trust me - I have quite a number of people in my FB friendlist who, at some point in the past, worked either directly at or with JW. You have no idea how everyone of them is cheering right now.
I don’t know anyone who parted on good terms.
Really?? Thats sad! Not a good company to work for, I take it then?
Now that I think about it - I remember when they screwed over the maker of…was it The Guild and banned him from the Jowood forums and tried to make him shut up.
Huh - didn’t know they published Torchlight…
Huh, I liked a spate of JoWood games. Sad.
Most of the games they published that I liked were products of other developers, so I can’t say as it means much to me that they are closing up shop.
That said, I wish current JoWood employees the best of luck in finding new (and hopefully more satisfying) positions with other companies quickly and easily. It sucks whenever I hear about good people losing their jobs, even in the volatile games industry.
In Europe, maybe. They certainly didn’t have anything to do with it in NA.
They released some good games, but they treated their developers like shit. I am just surprised it took so long. I guess the shit that is Gothic 4 didn’t sell, deservedly.
Good, I was gonna say it would suck to have lost Torchlight 2, but that isn’t the case then.
It could be more that Jowood is a publisher, and not a developer? I don’t think they had any in-house development, or owned any dev studios.
Yeah, Runic (Torchlight dev) and the Torchlight IP are owned by Perfect World, a Chinese F2P publisher/developer.