Flaming Fowl CEO shares the reason behind Ironmarked’s demo and its being shelved. Read on to understand the reasoning behind this and why it led to employee layoff.
Flaming Fowl Game Demo Release, Halt in Production & Employee Layoff
Ironmarked Demo Release
Flaming Fowl, an indie game studio helmed by CEO Craig Oman, announced on Twitter yesterday that a demo for Ironmarked will be available on Steam. In the same post, they announced that the game would also experience a halt in production due to a lack of funding.
Oman, drawing from his own experiences at Lionhead, where projects often faced cancellation, still wanted to release a demo of Ironmarked, to let players wishlist it on Steam, giving it a better chance of returning to production.
Oman together with other developers from Lionhead Productions who worked on the Fable Trilogy, founded Flaming Fowl in 2016 and garnered attention with the card game Fable Fortune. Following this success, the studio ventured into the strategy genre with Gloomhaven in 2021. However, despite its promising trajectory, the unveiling of Ironmarked was marred by setbacks indicative of broader industry challenges.
Halt In Production
In an interview with Video Games Chronicle (VGC), Oman shared that the reason behind the halt in production is mainly because of the downturn in investment in the video games industry. Ironmarked's demise can be traced to a series of unfortunate events, beginning with the unexpected withdrawal of its publisher last summer, almost a year of self-funding, to unsuccessfully finding publishers who were willing to sign them.
And it’s not as if they didn’t try, they pitched to multiple publishers who thought the game and the team looked great and even to publishers who presented offers to them previously but are “no longer looking for projects like this.” according to Oman. Ironmarked is a strategy card game, it’s also a mid-tier game that was being pitched for $5 million, which had “little opportunity in that ballpark”.
Employee Layoff
With the industry experiencing low investments, this has hit Flaming Fowl hard not only for the studio but its employees as well. “Friday was the last day for most of the people at the company. We’re down to about nine people now, from around 30 people we were working with. It’s been difficult, yeah. I just hope they all find work quickly because that’s the really painful thing.” Omar shared with VGC.
Having experienced being laid off from Lionhead, Oman is hopeful that affected employees can bounce back from this.
Source:
Video Games Chronicle Article
Ironmarked Steam
Flaming Fowl’s Twitter
