Earlier this year, Swedish developer Liquid Swords released Samson, a GTA-ish, open world beat ’em up about dealing with debt, driving sturdy but battered cars, and saving your sister. It wasn’t received all that well, including by us, notably because it was quite broken. While subsequent patches did seek to address those issues, it doesn’t seem like it was quite enough, as the developer has gone bankrupt.
As reported by Swedish outlet Breakit (via Gametalk), on October 12th the Stockholm District Court put out a bankruptcy order against the developer. According to Breakit, almost 30 employees are affected, with the Swedish state stepping in to cover all unpaid salaries. It seems that staff had gone at least two months without pay, obviously a significant period to be without it, and they themselves petitioned to file the company as bankrupt. Breakit also said that the administrator for the bankruptcy filing is hopeful in regards to finding a buyer.
Liquid Swords has been around since 2020, led by former Avalanche Studios co-founder Christofer Sundberg; you’ll know that studio as being behind the Just Cause series. Samson is Liquid Swords’ first and only game, and if all goes poorly potentially last. The game did receive an update as recently as this month, bringing adjustments to combat responsiveness and a range of fixes, so at the very least considering the devs were going unpaid for a lengthy period, they’re certainly somewhat committed to it still. It couldn’t have been easy to get it out the door in the first place, however, considering half the team got laid off partway through development.
Julian and Mark shared their verdict on Samson when it released, with the latter saying, “One of the things aside from scale which sets Samson apart from its inevitable pre-release comparisons – the likes of GTA and Sleeping Dogs – are the high stakes its daily cycle of debt repayment puts on all of the jobs. You literally pay for being an incompetent thug, which ratchets up the tension and keeps you invested even when you’re beating up the same bunch of goons for the second or third time. The problem is that the bugs which lead to key NPCs not being summoned or missions randomly failing fundamentally undermine those stakes by leading you to fail jobs due to technical hiccups which aren’t your fault.”
