Daedalic Entertainment, the developer of the disastrously reviewed The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, will be shutting down its internal game development team. Instead, Daedalic will focus solely on game publishing and marketing. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum will be the final game Daedalic’s internal development team will have worked on.Daedalic Entertainment has been publishing games developed by external development teams since 2002. In 2008, Daedalic launched an internal development team that worked on a series of titles that failed to achieve widespread success. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, its highest-profile title to date, was poorly received by both critics and gamers alike. Gollum was riddled with bugs upon release. Reviewers lambasted its dull gameplay loop, its uninteresting narrative elements, and overall sloppy and under-baked puzzle design.Gollum was released in such bad shape that the studio felt it was necessary to issue a public apology to atone for the game’s myriad technical and game design failings. Daedalic may be shutting down its internal development, but it has promised to continue releasing patches for Gollum. Just how long it will continue supporting a game that was a critical and commercial failure remains to be seen.
Daedalic Entertainment also announced it is ceasing development of another game set in the Lord of the Rings universe. Daedalic hadn’t provided too many details on that game’s genre or any story details, only hinting that it may have involved magic-wielding wizards. All that was known is that it had been in development since mid-2022, so it’s likely that the project was still in its early phases when it was shut down. Daedalic had received €2 million from Germany’s Ministry of Economics, which has been informed of the game’s cancelation.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was another in a long line of game developers and publishers issuing public apologies for releasing games in a poor technical state. Since Gollum was Daedalic’s most expensive project to date, its financial and critical failure was more than enough to seal the development team’s fate.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, with a Switch version to come at a later date.