GRiN, the Belgian studio behind Woolfe: The Red Hood Diaries, has announced on their official blog that they are filing for bankruptcy and closing the studio. Additionally, they will be unable to send their Kickstarter backers their promised rewards, saying they lack tghe funds to even buy the postage to send them out. From the post:
The crazy thing is, that we have most of the rewards ready for postage. All the backer stickers and letters of enlistment just need a stamp. All the poster sets printed, signed and ready. The artbook is ready to be printed, the soundtrack is ready for distribution, the DVD case is ready for production. But we have literally no money whatsoever to pay for stamps, let alone print the artbooks and dvd-cases.
The post discusses the reasons for the game's lack of success, citing the difficulties of shifting production from 2D to 3D without a significant budget change, issues with collison detection, and the combat system's shortcomings as points of failure.
GRiN is far from the first studio to successfully fund their Kickstarter campaign only to fail to deliver the game and/or incentives as promised. The developers on games like The Stomping Land and Code Hero have pulled far worse, failing to release a finished product all together. Often the amount of money raised far exceeds that initially asked for, leading many to wonder exactly what went wrong. In this case of this development team, lack of experience played heavily into their demise.
via GameInformer