By all accounts, Damnation was a bad game. Bad games are certainly plentiful in this industry, but unfortunately for Damnation developer Blue Omega, the game's title has proven prophetic. According to a previously released Twitter message from Blue Omega programmer Geoff Rowland, the studio that developed Damnation has been damned, with the entire development team laid off. The Tweet has since disappeared, but is now confirmed by at least two other sources.

In addition to the blanket layoffs come reports from Shacknews of two lawsuits revealing a very troubled production for the critically panned game. The first lawsuit alleges Blue Omega's failure to pay studio Point of View for work on the game they were outsourced to perform, resulting in POV appealing to the game's developer, Codemasters, for compensation. The second lawsuit involves another outsourced studio, Velvetelvis, which is charged with shoddy work on the game that railroaded Blue Omega's development schedule, delaying the game's release and incurring further development costs.

This hardly sounds like the sort of productive work environment that people hope for during game development. Except this time, it wasn't just the game and gamers that suffered, it was also the developers, who now find themselves out of a job.

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YodasLuvChild said:

... I'm not suprised. I was really looking forward to this game only to find out it was complete crap. I saw clip after clip of whoever was demoing it and it looked cool. But this is probably another case of a game getting hatched before its time. What I don't get is, isn't there anybody working for these companies who test these games and say whoa wait! This games sucks! We need to fix this and this and this. Of course there are but why doesn't anyone listen to them? Instead they throw their workforce in front of a train and release the game anyway, broken or not! The Ceo and or who ever is behind releasing a game before its time doesn't have to worry about their job! This game really could have been something special but instead its the device thats lead to people out in the unemployment line!

July 02, 2009

Deschain said:

... In my opinion Damnation was caught in an avalanche of negativity it didn't deserve. The game had its faults, but (at least for me on the PC) no more than many other games that were not so heavily panned. It's always sad to see people lose their jobs, and even if the game had been moderately successful this may have still happened. But it has to be especially difficult for the team that put so much effort into the game to take this double blow.

July 02, 2009