Housemarque puts Stormdivers on hold to focus on ‘most ambitious’ game yet

Housemarque, the Finnish video game developer behind Dead Nation and Nex Machina has revealed its decision to put Stormdivers on hold. The battle royale game has been in development for a long time, having been announced in 2018.

The decision was conveyed via an open letter from CEO Ilari Kuittinen, which also served to celebrate the 25 years of Housemarque. The studio now has over 80 employees, its biggest count yet, and everyone seems to be excited at the prospect of its new and most ambitious game yet, with support from an “yet-to-be announced partner.” Work on this project is ongoing for almost three years and is in full scale production now, with plans to reveal more about it in the coming months.

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The downside of this is that Housemarque had to put “every other project on hold, including the development of Stormdivers.” There no denying that the studio is excited about the new game:

“We’ve never delivered anything at this scale before. The time is drawing ever closer when our publishing partner will reveal what we are working on, with the launch coming after that.”

Putting Stormdivers on hold pretty much equals to it being shelved, as it seems unlikely the the studio is going to resume work on a game that it doubted would succeed, as it revealed in April 2019:

“Whether we’re going to succeed, it’s unlikely because of the tough competition.”

We can only speculate that working on a game that seemed doomed from the start was surely disheartening for the team. Despite some nice weather effects, Stormdivers had bland combat and felt like a generic battle royale game. It certainly didn't feel like a title from the masters of arcade action games, despite the drastic tonal shift.

Are you going to miss Stormdivers? Or should I ask, did you know about Stormdivers?