Samson Studio Liquid Swords Bankrupt, Staff Unpaid for Two Months

What happens when a game studio can't even pay its own team? That's the harsh reality for Liquid Swords, the Swedish developer behind the run-based open-city crime sim Samson. The studio has officially gone bankrupt, just six months after Samson launched.

A bankruptcy order was issued against Liquid Swords on October 12, according to a report from Breakit (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun). The kicker? It was the employees themselves—around 30 of them—who petitioned to have the company declared bankrupt, because they hadn't been paid for at least two months. That's a tough pill to swallow for the people who poured their time into the game.

Liquid Swords was founded in 2020 by Christofer Sundberg, who previously co-founded Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios and co-directed the first game in that series. Samson was the studio's debut title, an open city-crime sim with a distinctive run-based structure where you play a getaway driver trying to pay back an enormous mob debt by any means necessary.

But the road to release was anything but smooth. The studio initially envisioned Samson as a much larger action RPG, but struggled to find a publisher—one publisher rejected the pitch five separate times. Last year, Liquid Swords ran into funding trouble and laid off half its team. It also radically adjusted how Samson plays, which is how the run-based structure came to be.

When Samson finally launched in April, it received mixed reviews. Unfavourable—and somewhat unfair—comparisons to Grand Theft Auto didn't help, and bugs and technical issues compounded the problems. In the months since, Liquid Swords worked to patch things up, releasing a patch as recently as October 8. But clearly, those efforts weren't enough to generate a surge of interest in Samson or keep the lights on.

So what happens now? The administrator for the studio, Cirio Law, has put Liquid Swords and its assets up for sale—including Samson itself—with the bidding window open until October 21. As for the affected employees, the bankruptcy means their unpaid salaries will be covered by the Swedish state wage guarantee. That's at least some relief for the roughly 30 staff members who went without pay for two months.

It's a sad end for a studio that had ambitious plans, and a reminder of how tough the games industry can be. Will you be picking up Samson, or do you think the run-based twist deserved more love? Let us know in the comments.