One of the teams at Bellevue, Wash.-based game studio collective ProbablyMonsters has officially halted development on what was to be its debut project.
Cauldron, headed by former Bungie art director Dave Matthews, had yet to publicly reveal what it was working on.
“Building new teams, original games, and innovative worlds from scratch is an amazing opportunity and one of the biggest challenges in entertainment,” said Harold Ryan, ProbablyMonsters CEO, in a statement to GeekWire.
Ryan continued, “As we strive to sustainably iterate, grow, and learn, not every project will make it to market for a variety of reasons. We have made the difficult decision to stop development on an unannounced project.”
ProbablyMonsters, founded in 2016 by Ryan, former CEO at Bellevue, Wash.-based Bungie, is a studio collective that bills itself as “building a family of sustainable game studios through a people-first culture.”
ProbablyMonsters is currently in the process of “evaluating individual options” for employees affected by Cauldron’s canceled game. This is being done with the stated goal of reassigning as many employees as possible to other teams at ProbablyMonsters.
Cauldron will remain open as a studio within ProbablyMonsters. “We will continue to explore different opportunities for storytelling with Cauldron,” Ryan said.
News of Cauldron’s project’s cancellation began to spread 6 days ago via a LinkedIn post by one of the affected employees, which was quickly picked up and reposted in the subreddit /r/GamingLeaksAndRumours.
The first public announcement of the project’s cancellation was made by Ryan via LinkedIn on June 22, saying that “for this game, the competitive landscape is too uncertain.”
Cauldron is one of two studios currently within ProbablyMonsters’ network, alongside Battle Barge, which is headed up by John Dunbar, Patrick Blank, Marsh Lefler, and Allen Fong.
ProbablyMonsters’ third studio, Firewalk, was acquired by Sony in April for an undisclosed sum, and subsequently revealed its debut project, Concord, at Sony’s PlayStation Showcase on May 24.
