One of Vancouver’s most prominent independent game studios has filed for bankruptcy after what its CEO describes as the collapse of a potential business deal.
"It pains me to announce that Hothead Games Inc. is no more," CEO Ian Wilkinson said in a LinkedIn post made late last month. “Hothead closed its doors for the last time on Friday, December 13, 2024. We had a good run over the past 18 years but unfortunately, everything good or bad must eventually come to an end.”
The homegrown B.C. gaming company had been competing with the likes of Electronic Arts Inc. (Nasdaq:EA), the Coalition, Relic Entertainment and Kabam Inc. in terms of employee numbers in recent years.
Hothead was best known for developing sports and shooting games for mobile.
But Wilkinson said after entering the market for idle games “a little late” the company tried to re-establish itself as a console games developer while at the same time contracting out to large companies.
“Fast forward to the last 12 months. We created an amazing playable for an AAA property and had hoped to secure a contract to develop both mobile and console/PC versions of this game with different publishers,” he said on LinkedIn.
“Unfortunately, it took far longer than we expected to secure contracts for these versions of the game. They were both ready to close two weeks ago and then the mobile publisher pulled out due to a change in strategy. Two weeks later the console publisher also pulled out. At that point our only remaining option was bankruptcy.”
Hothead is among a wave of companies hit hard by insolvencies this past year.
The company had 140 workers as of 2019.
