At the tail end of March, we finally received word that earlier furloughs of staff at Jeff Strain’s Crop Circle Games transformed into a full studio shutdown, leaving many employees in the lurch and understandably upset. Now, after roughly two weeks of radio silence, Prytania Media’s former CEO Annie Delisi Strain issued a statement that tries to explain why, blaming the wider game dev job downturn and a lack of investors for the studio’s still-developing project in a statement that was initially posted on Crop Circle’s website before the site was taken down – but not before it was archived.
The statement opens with word that Crop Circle’s project has been in development for two years to the point it had a playable prototype, but after “dozens of pitches and reveals to publishers and investors,” the prototype was apparently unable to entice outside investment. “Player tastes and market conditions have changed rapidly since the pandemic-era start of the studio and the game simply was not commercially viable,” it reads.
Delisi Strain further argues that the proliferation of AI tools, a “permanent and sustained alteration and contraction” of the games industry, and a game prototype that was fully rejected by every single investor firm all coalesced in Crop Circle’s doom, even as she claims to have fought for the studio’s life.
“As the world destabilizes in the most brutalizing ways, the game industry is experiencing in parallel a once-in-a-multiple-generation kind of change. We don’t know exactly where it will land. It is awful on all sides. For now, like many other companies all over the world, we did incredibly painful and difficult things, including layoffs, to rapidly adapt to these new conditions, save every job we could, and fight to bring innovative new game experiences to a market that favors the mega-companies. For independent developers of all sizes, there are no easy paths forward. I stand by these decisions.”
In addition to these explanations, Delisi Strain bizarrely attempts to deflect focus away from the way the studio laid off its staff and towards an upcoming Kotaku article; though she admits she had not read the article, she asserts that author Ethan Gach intended to focus on her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis – something that Gach bluntly denies and former employees push back against.
