Big Fish Games terminates contracts with GrandMA Studios and Friendly Fox
(this is a repost from my post from Reddit, but thought this was important enough to share here too)
Big Fish Games has silently ended their contracts with GrandMA Studios and Friendly Fox a few days ago, both HOPA developers since 2012. Sources linked at the bottom of this post.
For GrandMA, due to only working for Big Fish Games for over a decade and nothing else, many of their employees will unfortunately lose their jobs. GrandMA's artists have already posted on LinkedIn about Big Fish cutting ties with the studio and how they're looking for new work. These artists mostly have updated their profiles to list themselves as no longer working for GrandMA this year. Ukrainian news articles state GrandMA will most likely have to cancel 5-6 games, likely including the to-be-released Whispered Secrets 18: Echoes of the Past that was in beta just a month ago.
For Friendly Fox, according to Ukrainian news articles, they are sustainable enough to continue their activities without Big Fish's involvement. It is unclear whether they can work on IPs like Living Legends, Bridge to Another World, Dark City, and so on without Big Fish as their publisher. Friendly Fox's social media is still active while GrandMA's isn't.
According to the Ukrainian news articles, Big Fish seems to have made this decision due to a change in owners (yet again) after being quietly sold by Aristocrat Leisure, which is confirmed to be their intention since early this year in a PocketGamerBiz article.
Big Fish also has a public job listing on LinkedIn confirming they are "building a new internal game development studio focused on premium-quality casual games, including Hidden Object, HOPA, Time Management, and Puzzle titles". This is under the name BFG Entertainment, which is also their new name on Steam. It is possible Big Fish prioritized this new internal studio over their outsourcing studios, hence this decision.
Sources:
GrandMA Artist Iryna Gershkova's LinkedIn post about this.
GrandMA Artist Yuliia Derevinska reposted the above on her LinkedIn.
GrandMA Artist Liubov Ishkovich's LinkedIn post about this (in Ukrainian).
GrandMA Artist Daria Holovchenko's LinkedIn post about this.
The GameDev DOU news website article about this (in Ukrainian).
The dev.ua news article about this (in Ukrainian).
PocketGamerBiz article about Aristocrat Leisure trying to sell Big Fish.
BFG Entertainment's LinkedIn job listing confirming a new studio (requires a LinkedIn Account to view; will redirect elsewhere if you don't have one)
