Three days after the release of the new Ghostbusters game, Fireforge Games filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The company has been liquidating its assets throughout July to attempt to pay off a debt that totals at least $12 million according to the bankruptcy filings.
Fireforge’s Ghostbusters game was not received well after its release, which was paired alongside the movie on July 12th. The game, according to one person who worked on it, was developed in only eight months.
The company filed for bankruptcy on July 15th.
Fireforge was founded in 2011 in Irvine, California by a former Blizzard employee Tim Campbell. Fireforge has had two MOBA-esque games in continual production for the past five years.
One of these games, code named “Zeus”, was due to be published by Razer. The other, code named “Atlas”, was funded by the Chinese publisher Tencent.
Fireforge owes around $11.3 million to Tencent, and in addition the studio is facing a lawsuit from a company called Min Productions. This company is a Singapore-based private company owned by Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan.
Fireforge has failed to keep the integrity of the contract while developing “Zeus” and instead used their money to work on “Atlas” with Tencent, according to Tan. However, Fireforge has said that they started working on “Atlas” once Razer stopped paying them.
This lawsuit is currently on hold as Fireforge deals with their bankruptcy proceedings.
