Possibility Space It has been closed. This is yet another development team to end its run, but in this case the situation is different than usual. The head of the company has in fact given the fault of the closure to the fact that the employees have made gods leak of private information.
Possibility Space, which was founded in 2021, hasn’t released a single game yet but it has already closed its doors. Employees received the news out of the blue a few days ago, and an internal email was shared to Polygon reporter Nicole Carpenter.
The studio head, Jeff Strainwrites that the Possibility Space staff was recently contacted by Kotaku journalist Ethan Gach regarding the closure of Crop Circle Games, another studio he co-owned with his wife Annie Delisi Strain under their company Prytania Media.
Gach’s questions included “non-public information” about the first Possibility Space game, Jeff Strain said in the email, as well as confidential business information from Prytania Media, including the identity of its publishing partner.
Jeff was shocked to learn that the information came from current employees. He said that after disclosing the leak to the publishing partner, the company “expressed low trust in the desire to invest the additional resources necessary to complete the game”. Jeff and the unnamed publishing partner therefore “mutually decided to cancel” the project.
The letter goes on to announce the immediate closure of Possibility Space and ends with the note that Jeff is “stepping away from the video game industry” to focus on his family and caring for his wife, who recently revealed she is seriously ill.
The words of Jeff Strain’s wife
Annie Delisi Strain revealed her illness last week in an open letter about the closure of Crop Circle Games. The letter also refers to Gach’s upcoming article in Kotaku (not yet published at the moment).
Annie expressed fear that Gach’s article may reveal details about his medical records and said that Crop Circle’s closure was due to “a permanent and prolonged alteration and contraction” of the gaming industry and a lack of interest from investors towards Crop Circle’s game, which he called “fundamentally not in line with the tastes of emerging players”.
Crop Circle’s former studio director, Jess Brunelle, contradicted this justification in a post on LinkedIn after the closing. “This is a very reductive statement, I think it shifts the blame to everyone and everything except the people at the top,” she wrote. “Saying that our game wasn’t ‘commercially viable’ makes the team seem like we didn’t know what we were doing, which I assure you is not true. There is no evidence to support this claim and we will never know if it was a product commercially viable”.
This is clearly a complex situation, but there is one certainty: many people have lost their jobs and some potentially interesting projects will never see the light of day. We hope that those affected can find new jobs soon.
