Officially, Annapurna has stated that all their current and ongoing projects are still in production. But how sure are we that that will remain the case?
Annapurna made this statement after the bombshell news that Annapurna Interactive’s entire 25 person staff just quit the company. As a big fish in the small pond of AA and smaller scale video games, Annapurna has quite the number of lineups in the works.
As a publisher of small scale games, many of which are independent projects, Annapurna has to line up several of them annually to make the business worthwhile. They had just published Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, but they still have three titles planned for this year.
Dave Wreden, who made games like The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide, just gave us some reassurance about his next project with Annapurna. He shared this statement on Twitter:
“Just for the folks asking, we are 100% okay. Nothing’s gonna stop us from getting Wanderstop out the door very soon.”
One can see from Wanderstop’s Wikipedia page that there are a handful of people working on the game. So they did not have to deal with too much complexity with the project, and that also meant that if they were close to release that they weren’t likely to be hampered with development delays. On this end, Annapurna’s declaration has proven to be true.
Their two other Annapurna games slated this year are Ghost Bike, developed by Messhof, and Bounty Star, developed by Dinogod. As of this writing, neither Messhof nor Dinogod have updated us about their projects.
There are several games lined up for the future as well. While most of them are also smaller scale projects, two do stand out for being a bit more ambitious.
One of those two games is Silent Hill: Townfall. This is a co-production between Annapurna, Konami, and No Code, the developers behind Stories Untold and Observation. If it ever came to it, it is possible that Konami could take over some of this project’s needs, to make sure it reaches its finish line.
The other high profile project is Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth. Annapurna partnered on this game with the Blade Runner IP’s owner, Alcon Entertainment. However, this is the first game Annapurna is making themselves, with their newly owned game studio.
So, this game is in particular peril as they presumably do not have a studio making it right now. Depending on how things play out, this title could get cancelled, Annapurna could find a new studio, or Alcon could take the project to make on their own.
The possible perils behind this uncertainty are clearly high. For now, we will simply have to wait for Annapurna to get their affairs in order, and to reaffirm the status of all their upcoming projects.
