https://www.gameswirtschaft.de/wirtschaft/daedalic-entertainment-spiele-entwicklung-stellenabbau/

Summary:

-Daedalic is ending internal game development in the wake of LOTR Gollum's poor reception and lackluster sales, both of which failed to meet internal and external targets

-Development on their 2nd LOTR game is halted.

-25 employees will be laid off

-Daedalic will still exist as a sub-publisher within Nacon (who acquired them a few years ago), so their published games such as the recently announced Surviving Deponia are safe

Always sucks when people lose jobs like this. Hopefully, they land on their feet soon. Just because this game was bad doesn't mean individuals don't have the talent to make something better on another project.

Which is to be expected when you actually produce what is almost the equivalent of a turd really.

Of course, I'm sorry for the devs who lost their job(or had to work on this project really) but releasing a project in the state it was is quite unforgivable and I'd like if it were just as much for the most anticipated games that ends up no meeting the technical expectations (Ex. Redfall, Cyberpunk 2077, etc ...)

It's like Gollum wasn't the only thing that died chasing the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. -_-

This more than likely puts the blame on management and Embracer since they signed a deal to put out a bunch of LOTR projects and someone above greenlit this bad idea and rushed a game out. Devs get the blame. Can't know for sure of course but if anything like CP2077 that was all on management. A friend of mine used to work at MLB for the RBI games. He knew they were terrible but the guy in charge was hired due to nepotism and instead of using custom workstations are developers usually do, this guy wanted only Alienware PCs. Those piles of shit and no shocker they kept breaking down. MLB also wanted them out as fast as possible and quality was not a concern. With the Show now on all platforms the need for RBI died.

Embracer didn't greenlight Gollum, Daedalic themselves made a deal with the Saul Zaentz company to get the rights to make it as I recall, like 4 years ago. Embracer only acquired LOTR from the Saul Zaentz company like a year ago. Embracer did greenlight this second LOTR game that Daedalic was working on which is now cancelled, but they likely didn't realize how poor of a state Gollum was in when they greenlit it.

They say in the article that they will try to find new positions within the company for these 25 employees. They aren't actually let go from the company.