// PC GAMER — GAMING
Founder of bankrupt Samson studio mulls how to use AI for his next attempt: 'Cutting corners in game development has a habit of coming back to bite you in the ass'
Christopher Sundberg said the goal for his next studio is to make "a game we can afford to finish without needing every sales forecast to come true."
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Christofer Sundberg, the founder of Samson developer Liquid Swords, has confirmed the studio's closure, saying that while the console version of the game enjoyed "much greater success" than the PC release, it "wasn't enough to get the company across the finish line."
Reports over the weekend revealed that Liquid Swords had gone bankrupt just six months after the PC release of Samson, which was followed by a console launch in September. "It's been a hell of a ride and a lot of fun, even when the circumstances gave us very little to laugh about," Sundberg wrote. "Building a studio, creating Samson and releasing it on PC and consoles took an enormous amount of work from people who cared deeply about what we were making.
"The console versions met with much greater success than the PC release. We got them out, but that success wasn't enough to get the company across the finish line. Market conditions and some bad business decisions brought us here, and I own my part in that. I can look honestly at what went wrong and still be proud of what we built."
Samson wasn't especially well received when it debuted on PCs, and while post-launch updates have tightened it up, it still holds a very "mixed" rating on Steam, where just 55% of user reviews are positive, and a 51 aggregate score on Metacritic. It wasn't a MindsEye-scale mess, but Sundberg acknowledged shortly after Samson's launch that Liquid Swords "released a game with flaws."
Sundberg said in his message that discussions about how to support Samson in the future are now underway; more interestingly, he added that, with Liquid Swords gone, he plans to open a new studio. Despite the lack of the traditional cooling-off period, it's not surprising that Sundberg is staying in the game dev biz: Prior to Liquid Swords, he was the co-founder and chief creative officer at Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios.
"We make mistakes, we learn, we fall, we rise up, we move on. That's sometimes a painful process, especially when it affects people you care about, but I refuse to give up. I never give up," Sundberg wrote.
"I'll be back at it again soon and will share more about my plans for a new studio. It will be built with the current market in mind, with a solid foundation and business decisions that give the games and the people making them room to succeed. The lessons from Liquid Swords will be part of how I build it. I still love making games."
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