Eh, reputation is still a thing and they probably aren't getting to keep any of the IPs they worked on, like Stray or Outer Wilds. They also won't get to keep whatever cash the company might have had in reserve. My understanding is that the idea of spinning off a studio to be indie is that you get to keep developing your IPs to some extent, you still have your brand and your reputation, etc. Otherwise they probably would have done this at the beginning.

So, no, they didn't really spin it off heh.

This is not the stray team, the article picture confuses the story. They should've used the Annapurna logo instead but they probably wanted more clicks.

They're just part of the publisher though, they didn't make the games.

Not exactly the same. First of all, a new company hasn't formed yet and if it does it won't retain as many of the original staff because it doesn't have the same momentum as one formed through a legal separation of the companies while everyone is still employed.

It also can't retain the rights to Stray which would have provided some funding. And it doesn't retain the rights to whatever projects they had in development, so they won't have anything to work on for a while.

That legal spinning off was actually pretty important.

Unless theyre blocked by a non-compete

Isn't it enough that shitty games have to bear that triple A warning label these days?

Good bot

Isn't Journey from That Game Company? Love that game.

They all quit, so I think they have a plan.

They don’t have a solid catalog anymore, they quit the company that owns the publishing rights to the catalog.

These aren’t the developers quitting. It’s the publisher’s staff. Like If the employees of Republic Records all quit, Universal Music Group would still have the right to publish Taylor Swift’s or John Legend’s next album.

With blackcats & chonkers!!

In fact, forget the blackjack and the company!

They all quit, so presumably they'll attempt to establish themselves as a new publisher. I am.very much hoping for an announcement of that soon. If Annapurna, the parent company, was trying to blend their agencies, it'll be interesting to see if they can maintain the quality of their productions.

That's Annapurna Pictures, which still exists, so that is probably still happening. Annapurna Interactive was the branch of Annapurna that did game publishing, and the rest of the branches still have staff AFAIK

Annapurna was a publisher team, not a dev team (that published a lot of indie teams' games). I'm not entirely sure how this affects the devs though since I'm in general software development and not game development.

When Warner Bros shut down Adult Swim's game publishing team a few months ago, they did at least give publishing rights back to the original devs so something similar might end up happening here.

That being said it's also possible that all of the games Annapurna published get put in licensing limbo and the original devs get screwed over by this if the Annapurna parent company doesn't want to give up their publishing rights.