‘It’s been really painful’: Ex-Lionhead devs explain why they’ve announced, and shelved, a new game

An independent UK developer says it’s been forced to announce and postpone its game on the same day, and lay off more than half of its staff, due to the sharp downturn in investment in the games industry.

Flaming Fowl is a Guildford, UK-based developer, founded in 2016 by veterans of Microsoft’s closed Lionhead Studios. Its first game licensed the Fable franchise for card game Fable Fortune. It followed this up in 2021 with the critically acclaimed strategy title Gloomhaven.

On Tuesday, it announced deckbuilding strategy game Ironmarked. A demo has been released on Steam, but the studio says development has already been put on hold due to “the unusual financial situation currently affecting the video games industry”.

It asks that anyone who enjoys the Ironmarked demo Wishlist it on Steam, “as this will allow us to gauge interest and help us re-pitch the game once the industry has recovered somewhat in the future.”

CEO Craig Oman told VGC that Flaming Fowl had been forced to shelve Ironmarked after the game was unexpectedly dropped by its publisher last summer.

After nearly a year of self-funding development and unsuccessfully pitching the game to more than 30 publishers, Oman said the company was recently forced to end production and lay off more than half of its employees.

“We’ve been working on the game for over a year,” he explained. “We had a publisher, but they pulled out last year around June, and we’ve been self-funding since August. We’ve been pitching to publishers since then, but they all said, ‘the game looks great, the team looks great, but we’re not signing anything right now’.

“I think it’s partly because we’re a mid-tier size game,” he added. “Budget wise, we were originally pitching at around £5 million, but it just seemed like there was very little opportunity in that ballpark. People were either looking to sign stuff for a few hundred grand, or up to the £20-40 million range.”

Oman said the environment for developers trying to get their games funded is