Possibility Space, the game development studio founded by State of Decay creator Jeff Strain, has seemingly shut down, following in the footsteps of another of Strain’s studios, Crop Circle Games.
This news comes from multiple employees posting to Twitter/X today stating that they have been laid off along with all their fellow coworkers.
Possibility Space was founded in 2021 by Jeff Strain to work on an unannounced AAA game under the Prytania Media label. Prytania Media itself was founded by Strain and his wife, Annie Delisi Strain, in 2021 and in the years since has built up its label with studios including Crop Circle Games, Dawon Entertainment, and Fang & Claw.
However, the label has seemingly been in turmoil in recent months. After undergoing layoffs in February, Crop Circle Games shut down entirely just three years after it was established. While at both the DICE Summit in February and the Game Developers Conference in March, a number of current and former developers with connections to Prytania Media’s studios approached me to express fear and later anger with how the situation at Crop Circle had been handled. The initial layoffs were allegedly sudden and messy, with some employees being furloughed and kept on the hook for weeks only to be laid off later on anyway.
The strange and upsetting saga continued just over a week ago, when CEO Annie Strain publishing a lengthy letter on the company website. In the letter, she stated that Prytania Media was undergoing “difficult but absolutely necessary changes” including the closure of Crop Circle, the “significant reduction” of non-developer employees across Prytania, and the “successful realignment” of games and staffing at the other three studios, including Possibility Space.
Strain went on to blame the economic downturn of the industry and inability to find funding for the reductions, stating that the current financial struggles that have resulted in thousands of layoffs over the last year and a half are “a permanent and sustained alternation and contraction of the industry we all know and love.” She also repeatedly mentions an article supposedly in the works at Kotaku about the company’s situation, accusing the author of outing her own personal health struggles without consulting her. At the time of this piece, Kotaku has not published the article in question, and the Crop Circle website with the published letter is no longer available.
Update 10:35pm PT: Polygon journalist Nicole Carpenter has obtained and shared a copy of an email sent to Possibility Space staff, in which Jeff Strain blames the closure of the studio on the aforementioned unpublished Kotaku article and staff’s willingness to leak confidential information to a journalist. According to Strain’s email, the studio’s publishing partner expressed “low confidence they would be willing to invest the additional resources needed to complete the game,” and the two companies mutually agreed to cancel the studio’s project. This in turn led Strain to shut down the studio.
In a bizarre studio closure and layoff message to staff, Possibility Space owner Jeff Strain blamed the studio closure on employees leaking information to the press. pic.twitter.com/d4OHrm3z2N
— Nicole Carpenter (@sweetpotatoes) April 12, 2024
Original story continues: Given the strange sequence of events, it remains unclear exactly why Prytania Media as a whole is seemingly collapsing, or whether Dawon Entertainment and Fang & Claw will withstand the situation. IGN has attempted to reach out to parent company Prytania Media for comment via multiple avenues, but so far all our recent contacts with the company informed us they had either been let go, or were no longer in touch.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
