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Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

The Dear Esther devs scale back and go dark

The Chinese Room has laid off staff as a core team carries on.

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The folks at The Chinese Room are known as the creators of games like Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. That quite a portfolio for such a small studio. It's obvious that they've worked hard and long to make these games. In fact, they've worked so hard that it has affected them both physically and financially.

Dan Pinchbeck, co-founder of the studio, has written a blog where he says that the studio has been struggling for a while now. He had to lay off most of the staff a few months ago. One of the reasons for this is that he had a "health scare" earlier this year, related to the financial pressure of running a studio.

"Back in June, I had a health scare - nothing life-threatening, but enough to pull me up short and make us have a serious think about things. This was right at the tail end of development on So Let Us Melt, following a long period of ongoing pitches and negotiations to secure the follow-up project for the studio. To cut a long story short, the situation - between financial pressures, trying to keep the lights on for the employed team, the stress of end-of-development, health issues - just wasn't a tenable thing anymore. It was time to take a break, recharge, recover and have a good think about the future."

Pinchbeck states that this isn't necessarily the end, as the few who remain at the studio will still work on The 13th Interior and Little Orpheus, but that they'll just won't be a fully active development team for the next while. That's why they've decided to go somewhat dark for the next few months. It'll be interesting to see how the studio resurfaces, as Pinchbeck wants to go back to how things were before.

"(...)we're makers, fundamentally, and our roles were increasingly making it very difficult to be practically involved in doing the things we love and we started the company to be able to do. We're taking time to figure that out; how we get to be creatives, not managing directors. That's a whole other job and skill set and lots of people do it really well and love doing it. But it's not for us - it just led to stress and burn-out and a desperate need to actually make stuff again- whether that's art, music, games, writing. So this break is a chance to reconnect with all of that, and we figure we've earned that time."

Here's hoping The Chinese Room recovers and finds its stride again. We've certainly enjoyed what they've developed thus far. Perhaps scaling back, for the time being, is a healthier option than just soldiering on until you hit the wall as so many others have in the past...

Did you enjoy Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture?

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

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Everybody's Gone to the RaptureScore

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

REVIEW. Written by Katrine Baumgardt

"The sun is shining, the sky is blue and flowers dot the landscape with every colour you can imagine. It doesn't exactly look like the end of the world."



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