Woolfe: The Red Hood Diaries Developer Files for Bankruptcy, Puts IP up for Sale

Successfully Kickstarted in August 2014, and announced for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One earlier this year, Woolfe: The Red Hood Diaries is no longer in production, with developer GRIN announcing it has requested bankruptcy as they are unable to pay outstanding bills.

In a lengthy blog post on the game’s website, GRIN Founder Wim Wouters said the team is dismantled and “with Woolfe being the most passion driven thing we have ever created, it feels horrible to live with the feeling we let you down.”

Citing poor sales and mixed Steam reviews as reasons for their closure, Wouters talked about the beginning of the end:

The optimist in me led me to believe we could actually pull off making a “bigger” indie game. I really wanted to prove an indie game did not have to be rendered in pixels or stylized as a solution to cut development costs. I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong!

Changing the gameplay from 2D to 3D “had a major impact on overall development cost (we found out a little too late),” with collision detection becoming a big issue. As for the fences and borders used through the game, GRIN “just couldn’t get players to see them as an environmental gameplay challenge,” while the combat turned out to be more work than they originally planned.

Addressing Kickstarter backers, most of the rewards are ready for postage or printing, but “we have literally no money whatsoever to pay for stamps, let alone print the artbooks and DVD-cases,” so they won’t be delivered.

As for the planned Volume 2 of Woolfe, the low rating of Volume 1 has seen all interested publishers backing off and GRIN doesn’t have the funds to self publish it. Wanting “nothing more” than for the legacy of Woolfe to live on though, they are putting up the IP, all of the assets, and source code for sale.

Wouters ended the blog post by pointing towards this Reddit post by a former game developer on what they go through.

[Source: Woolfe Game via Game Informer, Scott Ellis]

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