Hello there, backlog survivors, abandoned-franchise veterans, and players who would quite like the game to be good before being invited into its expanded universe.
Bandai Namco has decided to dissolve and liquidate Reflector Entertainment, the Montreal studio behind Unknown 9: Awakening. Its November 10 announcement cites future business plans, further investment and the prospects for profitability. The liquidation timetable remains undecided. The company expects approximately €21 million in extraordinary losses associated with the closure, with the final amount and timing still under review. Bandai Namco announcement
A studio reaching this point should force some uncomfortable questions about what was approved, what players were offered and how long a business can keep spending on an audience it has yet to earn.
We think the industry needs to become much more comfortable hearing the answer: players can understand a product perfectly well and still decide they do not want it.
Build something people want before planning the universe
Unknown 9 arrived surrounded by the ambition of a larger entertainment property. Books, comics and a podcast gave it a world beyond the game. Push Square’s review Yet GamesRadar found that the game itself failed to make that wider universe compelling. GamesRadar’s review
On Steam, its all-time peak was 285 simultaneous players, reached on October 18, 2024. That measures concurrency on one storefront; the game also released on consoles. Even within that limited window, it shows how little momentum the PC launch generated. SteamDB
The imbalance is striking: a project organised around the possibilities of a franchise, facing the much earlier problem of persuading people to care about its first game.
Players were already questioning that approach before release. In a September 2024 discussion of its narrative-universe trailer, commenters wondered about building a wider series before discovering how the game would be received. That is an ordinary consumer question with enormous implications for production planning. Prelaunch discussion
A fictional universe earns attention one worthwhile experience at a time. Knowing that more lore exists somewhere else does very little for the person watching a trailer and asking whether the combat looks fun.
🍪 Chip hovers beside an enormous franchise blueprint, then points to a tiny, still-unbuilt box marked FUN.
The criticism reached the game itself
Unknown 9’s reception gives us more to discuss than the arguments surrounding its marketing.
GamesRadar criticised its awkward combat, presentation and pacing, while recognising the possibilities in its supernatural powers. Shacknews similarly found that the combat only began to fulfil its potential late in the adventure, and that the overall experience struggled to distinguish itself. GamesRadar review · Shacknews review
Those are fundamental problems for an action-adventure trying to establish a new name. Possessing enemies is an appealing idea. The encounters, responsiveness and progression have to make that idea consistently rewarding.
The potential did connect with some reviewers. Digital Trends praised the combat’s intricacy and saw promise in the series. That makes the missed opportunity more interesting: there was something here that could excite people, but the finished package did not persuade enough of them. Digital Trends review
Our standard is straightforward. A new game competes with everything else we could play, including excellent games we already own. Technical roughness, ordinary encounters and weak storytelling all make that competition harder. The budget behind a release cannot make the experience in front of us more enjoyable.
🦊 Kiki: “Being able to possess enemies sounds fantastic. Let me steal the biggest idiot in the room and turn him into a workplace safety incident. That is a pitch I understand.
“Then the game has to deliver on it. I want clever situations, satisfying controls and reasons to keep experimenting. If the exciting idea spends most of the adventure fighting the execution, I am going to notice. You cannot keep handing me potential like it is a currency accepted at checkout.
“And please stop acting as though being merely functional should inspire a standing ovation. My backlog contains games that have already proved they are worth my time. The new arrival is auditioning against those games, not against the publisher’s internal spreadsheet of how difficult this was to make.”
🍪 Chip floats toward a checkout with a sack labelled POTENTIAL. The cashier slides it back and points to a controller.
When creative priorities lose the audience
The sharpest argument around failures like this concerns what studios believe their audience should value.
We want creative teams to take risks and have convictions. We also want characters who feel alive, dialogue with friction and worlds that invite discovery. When writing becomes a delivery mechanism for an approved lesson, the adventure suffers. When design decisions are defended through the virtues of their intentions, the question of whether they improved the game gets pushed aside.
Our view is that ideological validation is a poor substitute for audience understanding. A studio can receive enthusiastic approval from people who share its cultural priorities and still fail to make a product those people, or anyone else, want to buy.
That is where leadership needs enough independence to ask difficult questions. Does this character work? Is this scene entertaining? Does the audience recognise what it loved about the series? Are we responding to useful criticism, or dismissing it because we dislike who said it?
A creative culture that cannot ask those questions is making expensive decisions with deliberately restricted information.
🦊 Kiki: “I have no interest in being assigned a moral homework sheet when I buy an adventure. Give the characters beliefs, let those beliefs collide, let somebody be wrong in a way that actually costs them something. That is storytelling. I am happy to think. I am considerably less happy to sit through dialogue that has already organised the correct thoughts into a mandatory training course.
“And if a scene is boring, telling me the intentions behind it were admirable will not improve the scene. Congratulations on the intentions. Could someone now write a character I want to spend twenty hours with?
“The part that really gets me is the attitude that customers need correcting when they do not respond. You are asking for their money and their free time. Try being curious about what they enjoy before putting the entire customer base on a performance-improvement plan.”
🍪 Chip levitates over a customer-feedback box, rescues a stack of unread cards and drops them onto the director’s desk.
Tripwire raises the same question about listening
Tripwire announced 36 layoffs on November 9. Its statement says work continues on Maneater 2, Killing Floor 3 and the Tripwire Presents publishing label. These cuts arrive while the studio still has games to support and projects to deliver. Tripwire’s statement · PC Gamer reporting
Co-founder and former CEO John Gibson has publicly offered to return and help the studio’s games and employees. His intervention places the dispute over Tripwire’s direction alongside a practical question: what would actually restore confidence in its future? Gibson’s November 10 post
For an established developer, audience understanding includes knowing why people returned to earlier games. Players build attachments to specific rhythms, systems, tone and possibilities. A sequel asks them to renew that relationship. Changing its foundations demands a convincing creative reason and an experience strong enough to justify the disruption.
We think studios should be wary of mistaking enthusiasm inside the building for demand outside it. A smaller group can dominate a conversation without representing the people expected to buy the result. Leadership has to test its assumptions against what players do, rather than only listening to voices that confirm the preferred direction.
The useful question is what the next game gives the audience that it wants more of. Asking that before production hardens around a different answer is considerably cheaper than discovering the mismatch after release.
🦊 Kiki: “If people come to your restaurant for the fantastic burgers, replacing the menu with a concept everyone in the management meeting finds more sophisticated is quite a gamble. Especially when your entire customer research consists of the management meeting agreeing with itself.
“Game studios can do the same thing. They inherit an audience, become embarrassed by what that audience enjoys, and start making a sequel for the imaginary customers they would prefer to have. Then the real customers go elsewhere and somehow the customers are the problem.
“Listen while you still have room to change something. You do not have to obey every angry post. You do have to understand why the people who liked your last game are looking at the next one and quietly closing the tab. That little click is worth more than another conference-room round of applause.”
🍪 Chip floats between a packed meeting room and an empty checkout, holding up a tiny sign: DIFFERENT AUDIENCES.
Global competition makes that mistake more expensive
The international comparison matters, too. Western publishers compete for the same evenings and spending money as studios in China, Japan, South Korea and everywhere else. Their corporate priorities have to survive that competition.
Phantom Blade Zero provides a timely example of the appeal of a clear promise. PC Gamer’s recent review centres on the pleasure of its combat and spectacle. A player can see the appeal of becoming extraordinarily dangerous with a sword without first buying into a company’s cultural self-image. PC Gamer’s Phantom Blade Zero review
The lesson we take from that competition is to make the appeal legible and deliver it convincingly. A game can be culturally specific, full of unfamiliar mythology and still excite people around the world. What travels is the experience.
We also need to judge business success against the cost of producing it. Sales matter, but development, marketing and continuing support determine how much revenue must be earned. A prestigious project with impressive-looking sales can still have a difficult business underneath it. Sensible scope gives creative teams more room to survive and improve.
🦊 Kiki: “My controller has a remarkably limited interest in a publisher’s ideological credentials. It does, however, notice when a sword fight looks incredible. Funny how quickly the international language barrier disappears when somebody shows us something we desperately want to play.
“If the competition is offering a wonderful evening and your pitch is a list of reasons we should approve of you, you have handed them a substantial advantage. I can appreciate a good intention for free. The entertainment is the part you are charging for.
“And please put the costs on the table before declaring victory. A huge sales number sounds lovely until the bill walks in wearing a larger number. Making a game people want and making it at a cost the business can sustain belong in the same conversation. Ideally before everyone starts ordering the franchise merchandise.”
🍪 Chip hovers beside a gleaming sales trophy, then struggles to lift the much larger invoice sitting behind it.
A wealthy parent cannot manufacture demand forever
The €21 million estimate attached to Reflector’s liquidation is a closure-related accounting figure. It gives us one concrete financial consequence of this decision, rather than a production budget for Unknown 9. Bandai Namco announcement
The broader business principle is unavoidable. A large publisher can fund experimentation, absorb a disappointing release and give a promising team another chance. All of those can be sensible investments. Continued support still needs a credible plan for producing something an audience wants.
More money does not answer a creative question. More years do not automatically produce stronger demand. If the strategy remains unchanged, additional funding can simply make the eventual failure more expensive.
We want the scrutiny directed at the people who set the priorities, approve the work and decide what evidence matters. Employees experience the consequences of those decisions through lost jobs and disrupted lives. Leadership should have to explain how it intends to avoid repeating them.
🦊 Kiki: “The parent company has money. Wonderful. That means it can afford to make a smart decision; it does not mean every previous decision deserves a lifetime subscription.
“If the plan is another year of spending followed by another explanation of why the audience is wrong, I would also have questions. What changes? What have we learned? What are we making that people actually want? Those seem like fairly basic things to establish before opening the giant corporate wallet again.
“And the people signing off on this stuff should be the first ones answering. Somehow the strategic vision gets a presentation, while the employees get the calendar invitation. I would love to see the accountability distributed with the same enthusiasm as the restructuring.”
🍪 Chip hovers above the boardroom table and slides a tiny WHY? stamp toward every executive chair.
The next audience has to be earned
Reflector’s closure decision and Tripwire’s layoffs should sharpen the industry’s focus on what players can actually see, feel and enjoy.
For a new property, that means making the first game compelling enough to create demand for another. For an established series, it means understanding the appeal that built the audience before replacing it with a different vision. Across both, it means taking criticism seriously before the business reaches the point where the consequences become irreversible.
We want games with personality, confidence and something worth saying. We want developers to make creative choices that survive contact with the people expected to pay for them.
The audience is allowed to choose something else. Every worthwhile plan has to begin there.
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🚀 Stay curious about the games that earn your attention.
🍪 Keep demanding creative decisions that improve what we play.
🧠 Remember: an audience is earned one good game at a time.
🦊 Kiki · 🍪 Chip · ⭐ Byte · 🦁 Leo
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🦊 Kiki: “I love ambition. Show me a strange world, a fantastic character, a mechanic that makes me immediately reach for the controller. Then tell me there is more of it. You will have to physically stop me from investigating the lore.
“But when the first thing I feel is indifference, explaining that the indifference comes with a podcast is a bold sales technique. We are already discussing the franchise roadmap while the audience is still asking what the game does. Somebody has designed the gift shop before checking whether anyone wants to visit the attraction.
“Earn the obsession. Give us the moment we want to tell a friend about. The expanded universe can wait until somebody wants to expand their evening to include the first instalment.”