Polish dveloper Jukai Studio, known for their horror game Stray Souls, have announced they’re shutting down.
The developer noted “many reasons” for their choice to shut down including cyberbullying, and most notably poor sales and reviews on Stray Souls.
However, the final nail in the coffin seems to be the closing of their publisher Versus Evil, which happened not long after their game was shipped last October for most platforms.
Despite the developer closing their doors, no staff have been officially laid off and support for Stray Souls will continue, apparently. The studio was seemingly a smaller team, and its staff will “go their seperate ways.”
Here’s the full word from Jukai Studio on the closure:
After much contemplation and in light of today’s news that our publisher has announced closure, we have decided not to delay in informing you that we are shutting down Jukai Studio.
Some of you may have noticed that our website has not been functioning for some time, and we have not been as active as before. There are many reasons for this, but one of the main ones is that we have fallen victim to cyberbullying, received a poor reception for our debut project Stray Souls, and were completely unable to sustain the company because of bad sales, leading to the decision having to be made this year.
We are aware that you had high expectations for Stray Souls, but we never informed you that only two core individuals, along with contracted personnel, were working on the game. We did everything in our power to bring the project to completion in the best possible form, but throughout the entire duration, we, our publisher staff, other publisher dev teams and our closed ones were constantly attacked by a cyber persecutor, and some of you, as our community, were also tormented with unwanted messages and emails. We understand that you did not wish to continue actively supporting us for the obvious reasons mentioned above. The matter is now in the hands of our lawyers, so we cannot speak about it any further, but know that we will not abandon it despite the studio’s closure.
Once again, we wanted to thank all of you who supported us and did not give up despite the adversities that befell both you and us. We sincerely thank everyone for believing in us. No one from Jukai Studio has been laid off because we never functioned as a large corporation, and together we decided that each one of us will go their separate way.
Jukai Studio consisted of a truly amazing and talented group of people who believed in the success of the project until the end. Despite this sad news, Stray Souls remains in your hands. In conclusion, we want to add that this year has been very difficult not only for us, and we hope that 2024 will be a year of positive changes in the world of game development. Thank you to everyone who supported us.
JUKAI STUDIO
