"What we did learn is we might not tackle a game like this again."
- Obsidian Entertainment CEO Feargus Urquhart, speaking to Eurogamer after Obsidian announced it was relinquishing development of the MMO tank game Armored Warfare.
After years of work and at least one round of layoffs, Obsidian Entertainment announced yesterday that it is fully surrendering development of its free-to-play MMO tank game Armored Warfare to publisher My.com and stepping away from the project.
What does this mean for the folks working at Obsidian? The full picture is yet unclear, but fellow devs may appreciate company chief Feargus Urquhart's recent assurances to Eurogamer that "we are doing fine."
According to Urquhart, staffing on the company's other high-profile project, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, is not in jeopardy thanks to both royalties from the first game and its current crowdfunding campaign on Fig.
The studio has some other projects in development as well, including a digital card game, but given the tone of Urquhart's comments it seems unlikely any of them will be as ambitious as Armored Warfare.
"Large MMOs are really beyond the ability of an independent developer to manage unless that developer gets huge and brings in all the other aspects of the business: operations, customer service, live operations, etc.," Urquhart told Eurogamer. "Those things all sound interesting, but what is more interesting to us, and to me personally, is focusing on the making of a game. When a studio begins to focus on all those other things, you are all suddenly in a lot of meetings every day that aren't to do with game development."
Oddly absent from all the back-and-forth in Eurogamer's article is any mention of Tyranny, the RPG with a unique moral structure that Obsidian released in November. It's unclear if this means the game is not a significant revenue driver for the studio or if it simply didn't come up.