It has been a tough couple of months for OtherSide Entertainment, developers of the long-awaited System Shock 3. The future of the game is in danger as the company has suffered several layoffs. Back in 2017, Otherside Entertainment sold the publishing rights for the game to Starbreeze Studios, but within two years Starbreeze returned the rights to the developers, as they faced financial troubles after the failed launch of Overkill's The Walking Dead. Developers have been trying to find a publisher for System Shock 3 for quite a while now, but no publisher has taken any interest.
A former Otherside developer posted on the RPG Codex Forum using an alias Kim Corn Karn: "I don't actually know what's going on, but the team is no longer employed there."
The developer explained that "most of the work is content development which we were critically behind in, both in real assets and in tool support for an efficient pipeline.”
"Was the failure of the project right? It's hard to say. If Starbreeze hadn't gone into crisis I think we would've delivered something interesting with some fresh and innovative gameplay, but a much smaller game than what people were expecting and inevitably disappointing for a sequel to such a beloved franchise.” Kim Corn Karn further added “Those high expectations drove a lot of expensive experimentation. We were a small team and knew we couldn't compete with current immersive sims in production quality and breadth, so we had to be creative and clever and weird. And we were on our way to make something unique and possibly fun, but probably not what the audience was hungry for."
The earlier System Shock games became very influential in the video game industry. They were the inspiration for both the Deux Ex and Bioshock series. Currently, there is another System Shock game in development. Nightdive Studios is developing a remake of the original 1994 release of System Shock, so if the game by Otherside Entertainment doesn’t come to fruition, we still have the remake to look forward to.
