After nearly two decades in business, Vancouver studio Hothead Games has shuttered.
“It pains me to announce that Hothead Games Inc. is no more,” company president Ian Wilkinson stated last week.
Hothead filed for bankruptcy this month following last-minute contract cancellations from partners which the studio couldn’t financially recover from.
“We created an amazing playable for an AAA property and had hoped to secure a contract to develop both mobile and console/PC versions of this game with different publishers,” Wilkinson wrote on LinkedIn. “Unfortunately . . . the mobile publisher pulled out due to a change in strategy. Two weeks later the console publisher also pulled out.”
“At that point our only remaining option was bankruptcy,” he said.
Hothead had pivoted back to console game development after pivoting to mobile gaming in 2019.
Wilkinson says the team at Hothead was “chock full of incredibly, smart, talented, loyal, hardworking but mostly just really nice people.” The organization had been named one of Canada’s Best Workplaces in Technology.
Some of the games Hothead made over the years include Box Office Tycoon, Hero Hunters, Kill Shot Bravo, Idle Bowling, and Super Hit Baseball.
Hero Hunters, a third-person role-playing game, earned the Google Play Most Innovative Game Award, while the “Kill Shot” era represented “the most successful years for Hothead,” according to Wilkinson.
Hothead was founded in 2006 by three former Radical Entertainment employees—Steve Bocska, James Ceraldi, and Joel DeYoung—to create computer and console games.
The firm’s final day of business was December 13th.
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