German developer Mimimi Games, the creator of Shadow Gambit, Desperados III and Shadow Tactics, is closing down.
Mimimi Games released Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew to glowing reviews on 17 August, with the PS5 version of the game currently on a Metacritic score of 87. But now, less than two weeks after the game’s launch, the studio is shutting down.
In a statement on the Mimimi Games website, the studio’s founders Dominik Abé and Johannes Roth explained the reasons behind the company’s closure:
It is with a heavy heart that today we have to share the news that Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew will be Mimimi’s final game.
As we look back at our 15-year journey crafting games (and crying about it), we feel grateful for the incredible love and support we received from all of you. We cherished every game we made and feel proud of what we were able to accomplish as a studio.
At the same time, dedicating the past decade and a half of our lives working on increasingly ambitious games took a heavy personal toll on us and our families. After the release of Shadow Gambit we decided it was the right time to prioritize our well-being and to pull the brakes instead of signing up for another multi-year production cycle.
While this means that we won’t start production on a new big game, we will continue to fully support Shadow Gambit. We are already working on a patch across all platforms and have a big content drop planned for later this year, which we are sure you will love just as much as we do!
Later in the statement, the founders explain more about why they have taken the decision to wind down Mimimi Games over the next few months. They note that production costs are growing faster than the potential revenue from future games in the real-time tactics genre which Mimimi specialises in. But they also note the personal toll that the company has taken. “Since 2011 and pitching The Last Tinker, there never was any down-time for either of us,” they said. “As founders and directors, we found it increasingly difficult to strike a balance between fulfilling internal expectations for the studio and being available for our young families.”
The pair have pledged to help Mimimi employees find work at other companies, and added that thanks to the launch of Shadow Gambit, they are able to “pay out a bonus to all employees to help them during their transition”.
Mimimi Games was founded in Munich, Germany, in 2011, and the studio helped to revive the semi-dormant real-time tactics genre with the release of Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun in 2016. Real-time tactics had its heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s with series like Commandos and Desperados, and indeed Mimimi would revive the latter series by creating Desperados III in 2020. Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is the studio’s most ambitious real-time tactics game yet, offering huge maps with a myriad of ways to approach them using different characters with wildly different abilities. Sadly, it will now be the studio’s last.
Tributes to Mimimi Games and expressions of regret at the studio’s closure have been flooding X (aka Twitter). “Utterly devastating news,” said Rock Paper Shotgun editor Katherine Castle. “Mimimi were some of the best in the biz, and games will be a poorer place without them.”
Read more: Desperados III review: The fastidious bunch
