GriN, the developers behind Woolfe: The Red Hood Diaries, has gone bankrupt and will no longer be able to fulfill their Kickstarter promises. The announcement was made August 10th with a post titled “Game Over.” Owner Wim Wouters solemnly says at the beginning of the post, “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed.”
Wouters gives many explanations for why the game and company failed, but he states that it started once GriN became more successful. Wouter managed the company after his two other partners left and slowly built the company up. It wasn’t until some initial success creating games for other parnters that Woolfe was in production. “The optimist in me led me to believe we could actually pull off making a “bigger” indie game. I really wanted to prove an indie game did not have to be rendered in pixels or stylized as a solution to cut development costs. I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong!” The game was too much to handle for such a small company.
To make matters worse, GriN promised their Kickstarter supporters exlusive Woolfe merchandise, which they can no longer afford. “The crazy thing is, that we have most of the rewards ready for postage. All the backer stickers and letters of enlistment just need a stamp. All the poster sets printed, signed and ready. The artbook is ready to be printed, the soundtrack is ready for distribution, the DVD case is ready for production. But we have literally no money whatsoever to pay for stamps, let alone print the artbooks and dvd-cases.”
At first GriN wanted blame everything for their games downfall: players, oversaturated markets, and undervalued price tags. However, in the end Wouter admits that “We can only blame ourselves…”
If you want to read more on the topic, you can see Wouter’s goodbye post here.