From Gematsu:

AlphaDream, the studio behind the Mario & Luigi RPG series, filed for bankruptcy in Tokyo district court on October 1.

The company was first established in May 1991 as the interior and exterior finishing work company Mente Tomo and Ai, before changing its name to AlphaStar Soft in January 2001 (then AlphaDream in July that year) when it began work on video game planning and development.

AlphaDream is mainly known for its work on the Mario & Luigi RPG series for Nintendo and the Hamtaro series for Marvelous, among other titles. Most recently, it developed the smartphone game Kedama no Gonjiro: Fit and Run for ForwardWorks.

As the company was constantly entrusted with developing series titles, it recorded an annual income of 300 million yen in the fiscal year ended March 2014. However, the sluggish income, heavier burden of development costs, and financial deficits in recent years have entered the company into a financial state of insolvency. Performance has yet to recover since then, leading to the current measures.

As of the end of March 2018, AlphaDream’s amount of debt totals about 465 million yen.

So that's the end of the road for Mario RPGs as far as we can tell. This news really saddens me, Superstar Saga is one of my favourite games ever made, and I've enjoyed all of their games (even Tomato Adventure). Hopefully Nintendo offers them a way to continue work, I was really keen to see what they could do on Switch.

Saw this earlier today, broke my fucking heart.

Does bankruptcy mean that the company's defunct? If so, I don't expect the M&L series to die, but these guys really did a good job with it (and I've heard a lot of talented people worked on the series).

I remember writing a thread about this. Some companies were gonna struggle now that there's no dedicated non-HD gaming platform. It didn't help that they released the BiS remake on the 3DS this late into its life...

If it wasn't for the debts, I could have seen Nintendo bailing them out and it would be their 1st acquisition for a while.

I'm shattered that this means that we won't get any more awesome tracks from Yoko Shimomura in the foreseeable future. She made the M&L series for me, so much character and charm in every song.. 

Their writing was impeccable as well, even when the games themselves dragged a bit (Paper Jam) the writing was still so engaging that I still enjoyed every moment. This is just tragic.

This is sad, but why on Earth did they focus so much on remaking games from ONE GENERATION AGO (mostly)? If they had made sequels rather than remakes, their sales would have been much higher. I still want more of these games, but I wasn't going to re-buy games I had beaten like 5 years ago on previous devices.

I think this was sadly probably a symptom of the debt disease that had infected them. The HD project they were working on (apparently for Switch and PS4) likely cost a lot more than they envisioned, and they thought the best way to raise cash cheaply was to push out remakes of their most successful games. If they'd come out in 2014 rather than 2018 I dare say it would have worked, but releasing on the 3DS post-Switch launch is suicide.

I didn't realise how low sales were for the remakes. Kind of curious why they went that route to begin with when the main series still sold well every entry.

The 3DS had remakes for games 1 & 3, and had games 4 and 5 on there.
The only Mario & luigi game you cant play on the 3DS is the 2nd one right?

It was a decent series, not as fantastic as some of the mario RPGs before, but it will be missed.

That might actually be true.... bad timeing with the 3DS ports, they came way to late, and thus sold like crap.
They should have done them earlier, garnered better sales and made some profit, that could then go towards a bigger project.

3DS is backwards compatible, you can play PiT on it.