Nine years after opening its doors for the first time, new reports suggest United Front Games , the studio best known for its work on Sleeping Dogs and (more recently) Smash+Grab , is in the process of permanently closing shop . Details are still scarce at this time, and there’s been no official word on layoffs yet, but the situation isn’t looking good for UFG.
Speculation about the company’s fate began Monday evening . Many noticed the development studio’s Twitter account had been silent since Oct. 15 and that it’s latest release, Smash+Grab, is no longer available for download on Steam. Within a few hours, Kotaku Australia confirmed the news United Front Games was shutting down. As we mentioned, additional details are still hard to come by. But it looks like anyone hoping for a sequel to Sleeping Dogs , or just ongoing support for Smash+Grab , better hope for an IP sell-off (or a last-minute influx of cash) in the very near future, especially with today’s Red Dead Redemption 2 announcement threatening to wipe out any small bit of attention that might’ve been paid to other stories.
The news isn’t entirely a surprise. The last few years haven’t been kind to United Front Games, which struggled to find a successful follow-up to it’s 2012 open-world crime game. Triad Wars failed to find an audience , ultimately being shuttered before it even left beta, but (for a time) it looked like Early Access title Smash+Grab might be the game to turn the company’s fortunes around. Unfortunately, it seems a recent free play weekend on Steam didn’t generate enough interest to keep United Front Games in business.
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