Minutes later, the forty employees of Impossible Studios sat in a meeting, befuddled, as executives from Epic Games told them their studio was closing. Less than a year after forming the studio,
Epic had decided to shut it down. The internet was off so no one could leak anything.
One nice thing about the ubiquity of smartphones is that this wouldn’t work today.
For the developers, who had now gone through two studio closures in less than a year, this was baffling and infuriating. Messaging from Epic had been that Impossible was doing just fine, even at the studio’s top levels. “The week before we were closed, Tim Sweeney told us on a call how important we were to the company and how valuable we were,” said one former high-level Impossible Studios staffer.
Executives in every industry are like this. How we always let them somehow become in charge of us is an amazing magic trick.