Apparently, the recent Ghostbusters game is doing even worse than the movie– developer Fireforge is filing for bankruptcy.
Following Ghostbuster 2016’s abysmal review scores averaging 31/100 and 0.7/10 user scores on Metacritic, Fireforge filed for bankruptcy 3 days after its release (via Kotaku). The game took only 8 months to develop, and released alongside middling film reviews: Rotten Tomatoes gives Ghostbusters 2016 a 73%, but only 58% user review.
This is the last in a series of misfortunes, or screw-ups, for the developer. A project codenamed Zeus, to be published by Razer, and another codenamed Atlas, which had funding by a Chinese investment company named Tencent, were both short lived. Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan is suing Fireforge via his Singaporean company Min Productions for allegedly using Zeus development money to work on Atlas. Meanwhile, Fireforge allegedly owes $11.3 mil. to Tencent.
This is not the first legal trouble for Fireforge: Richard Land, a lawyer, sued Fireforge last year. This lawsuit alleges Fireforge was to license Helios, 38 Studios’ social media platform, for $3.7 mil., but (in a move Facebook-centric film The Social Network describes) built its own version of the platform using employees from 38 Studios.
Sony’s Ghostbusters reboot has been a bit of a mess. Here’s hoping they stick to what they’re best at: (other) video games.