Starbreeze Studio has revealed that it lacks “sufficient secured funds to continue operating for the coming 12 months,” according to the company’s Q1 2019 financial report. Starbreeze, the publisher of Payday 2 was very open about the company’s current situation and warned shareholders in its latest financial report. The company revealed that they experienced major losses in sales, and will not last the next 12 months without additional funding.
This doesn’t come as a surprise since the studio has been in deep waters since the failure of Overkill’s The Walking Dead, which resulted in the series owner Skybound Entertainment terminating Starbreeze’s license. The game was also removed from Steam and canceled on Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One because it “did not meet the standards”. Afterward, in 2019, Starbreeze agreed to sell the publishing rights of System Shock 3 to OtherSide Entertainment.
Following the flop of Overkill’s The Walking Dead, the studio went under reconstruction in December 2018 and replaced its CEO Bo Andersson. Despite all the changes, the studio still continues to struggle according to the report. The record low operating profits for the quarter means that the studio might shut down before the year is over.
Starbreeze and some of its subsidiaries have been in reconstruction since December 3, 2018, the report read. The company currently lacks sufficient secured funds to continue operating for the coming 12 months and a liquidity shortfall is expected before mid-year 2019 if no additional funds are provided.
This sounds bad but Starbreeze’s temporary CEO, Mikael Nermark believes that the studio will “secure financing for the company’s future operations”.
This involves both long-term financing we can use to build the Starbreeze of the future, but also making sure that the assets we have determined are unrelated to the core business are managed in a commercially viable way. Once this financing has been secured, we will be able to look ahead and present a more detailed strategy for the future.
In the end, Nermark said that not all hope is lost, thanks to their strongest asset Payday. Let’s hope that Starbreeze manages to get hands-on additional funding soon. We don’t want the employees of the studio to lose their jobs. The company currently has a staff of 580 employees.
As for Payday 3, it was announced back in 2016 and sometime later the company revealed that it will take a while. We are likely to get Payday 3 by 2020 but only if Starbreeze manages to get stable again.
