I was perusing some video game news when I saw the headline “The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Dev Daedalic Ends Internal Development to Focus on Publishing“. At first, I didn’t think too much of it, thinking that it made sense given the issues surrounding that game, but then I suddenly came to a realisation and made an audible “Noooooo!” As you can imagine, the closure of Daedalic Entertainment’s development division breaks my heart and so I thought I might explain how this came to happen and why it breaks my heart.
For those of you who might not be aware of who Daedalic Entertainment are, I’d direct you to an article I wrote about them sometime ago. To quickly summarise though, Daedalic Entertainment is a German video game publisher and, now, former developer who began making point and click games such as Edna & Harvey, The Whispered World and Deponia to name a few. It was announced in 2019 that they would be developing and releasing a new Lord of the Rings game which featured Gollum as the main character. The game finally released this year and received a critical thrashing and, while no sales figures were provided, we can assume that it sold poorly enough that Daedalic Entertainment decided to stop making games and to just publish instead.