A Warhammer 'live service RPG' made in Unreal Engine 5 was apparently canceled after three years of development

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Daniel Erickson, CCO of Thought Pennies studio, recently announced that staff had been laid off and an upcoming game canceled. "Over the last three years at Thought Pennies we built something amazing", he wrote on LinkedIn. "We never missed a milestone, our feedback was great, our partnerships strong. We went from two people and a PowerPoint to a team of almost sixty heavily-vetted, incredibly independent, passionate professionals. Our publisher changed strategic direction, however, and our previous project is now without funding."

That project was apparently a Warhammer game. It's tough to say whether it would have been set in Warhammer Fantasy or Age of Sigmar based on mentions in the LinkedIn profiles of its developers, but what they do call it is a "cancelled fantasy live service RPG in Unreal 5", a "3rd person ARPG", and a "Co-Op PvE Action RPG with a cast of unique heroes and playstyles".

While I'm all for more Warhammer RPGs, we've already got Vermintide 2 for co-op PVE . And it's tough to be too disappointed about another live service game being canceled, given that it seems to happen every other week. Still, it's a shame that so many developers lost their jobs because an unnamed publisher changed its ideas about "strategic direction".

It's worth noting that, while it's been reported elsewhere that Games Workshop was responsible for pulling the funding that resulted in this cancellation, that's not how licence agreements work. Studios and publishers pay licence holders to use their intellectual property rather than the other way around—it's on the publisher whether they continue funding a new live service game after seeing a rash of failures and cancellations in the genre.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.