Galvanic Games, the independent Seattle-based developer behind video games such as Some Distant Memory, Rapture Rejects, and last fall’s Wizard With a Gun, is closing its doors.
Studio head and founder Patrick Morgan announced the shutdown in a statement Friday.
“Despite the promising start of Wizard With a Gun, sales are not strong enough to sustain our studio,” Morgan wrote. “The last year has been particularly tough for games.”
Morgan continued: “While we had numerous encouraging conversations at [the DICE Summit] and [the Game Developers Conference], the process of signing new projects … takes longer than the runway we had left.”
Ten employees are expected to lose their jobs in the closure. Galvanic Games has put up a thread on LinkedIn to celebrate their contributions and help affected workers secure new jobs.
Morgan founded Galvanic Games in 2015. Wizard With a Gun might’ve been its highest-profile game to date, made through a collaboration with indie publisher Devolver Digital.
It also toured the indie circuit in 2019 with its story/exploration game Some Distant Memory, and collaborated with Seattle’s tinyBuild and the authors of the webcomic “Cyanide & Happiness” to create the now-defunct satirical battle royale Rapture Rejects.
Galvanic’s shutdown adds to a long list of layoffs that have plagued the video game industry for the last year and a half. More than 10,000 developers have lost their jobs since January, already topping the previous record cuts from all of last year.
The dismissals aren’t coming from any one source, but factors are theorized to include the rising costs of modern “AAA” game development; a dramatic slowdown in available VC investment; a delayed correction after the post-pandemic gaming boom of 2020-2021; a consistently busy release schedule, which may have saturated the market; and the long-term impacts of the industry’s gradual embrace of “games as a service.”
