The Gollum game went down so badly that the studio is getting out of the game making business, while rumors for various remakes abound.
The Gollum game went down so badly that the studio is getting out of the game making business, while rumors for various remakes abound.
The “Gollum” devs, Daedelic, have been around a long time. They were mostly known for classic 2D adventure games, the best known among them were probably the “Deponia” series.
They wanted to go big with “Gollum” and failed even more spectacularly than most people realize: They already ran out of money in 2021 and had to sell themselves to a bigger company who brought in additional funds in order to finish the game. And even the money Daedelic got through that deal was limited, so they had to push out the game no matter what.
How did such a small company attain the rights to a Tolkien title in the first place?
I don’t know any details, but AFAIK they got lucky because the licensing company for LOTR, Middle-earth Enterprises, had been in a tug-of-war between media giants like Amazon, Time Warner and (later) Embracer for years when they struck the deal. I assume it was much easier for the company to greenlight relatively small deals for niche games with a smaller partner like Daedelic.