This past November, Overkill's The Walking Dead launched on Steam and fell way below expectations. After poor sales numbers and a mostly negative critical reception, the game's publisher Starbreeze Studios has been feeling the effects of a lack of revenue internally. While players have only seen the subpar experience first-hand for a couple of months now, much of the development team had known for years that things weren't looking good.
Around a dozen current and former employees from Starbreeze spoke anonymously with Eurogamer about their time working on Overkill's The Walking Dead. A major factor mentioned by many of these sources were signs of mismanagement from the design team, as it appeared there was no clear identity to the game throughout the development process. And then, when the game was shown off to press, the reaction was far from positive.
During this past E3, media outlets felt the game was "average" and unlikely to attract a large enough audience if it didn't improve. The team at Starbreeze decided to simply ignore the message, according to those speaking to Eurogamer, which led to countless weeks of meaningless crunch ahead of trying to meet project milestones.
Development crunch has been discussed to great degree recently, and Starbreeze is no exception. The company began having to offer extra vacation time for anyone who was willing to work extra hours, and even going as far as to offer the option to "cash out" on vacation days once the game was completed.
All of this led to the incredibly weak launch of Overkill's The Walking Dead this past November, where it was reported the game failed to reach 100,000 total sales on Steam. Since then, the studio fired then-CEO Bo Anderson, and was forced into "reconstruction" in order to pay off debts. Shortly thereafter, the company's offices were raided by Swedish authorities due to evidence of insider trading from one of their employees.
Overkill's The Walking Dead is a post-apocalyptic cooperative game developed by Overkill and published by Starbreeze Studios. While there were intentions to release the game on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the console versions have been delayed indefinitely.
Overkill's The Walking Dead is available on PC.
Source: Eurogamer