Piranha Bytes Has Fans Worried. Disturbing Silence at The Creators of Elex, Gothic
Fans of the Piranha Bytes studio are worried about its future. They cite several disturbing events in recent weeks as the reason.
Fans of the famous series of games, Gothic, Risen and Elex from German Piranha Bytes, are starting to worry about the fate of this team. There are several reasons for this.
- The studio's official YouTube channel has been silent for almost two months. The last video was published there on November 27th last year. This wouldn't be a concern for other teams, perhaps, but Piranha Bytes has been consistently dropping weekly videos showcasing various studio activities for years.
- Strange things are also happening to the studio's official website. At the beginning of this year, all information disappeared from it. Currently, there's only a large logo there.
- For this project WIKI6, most likely being Elex 3, disappeared from the database of the German federal agency, which is responsible for granting subsidies to productions from the gaming industry.
Keep calm
All this information can cause concern, of course. The situation is worsened by the fact that Piranha Bytes, owned by Embracer Group, is facing serious financial troubles, leading to mass layoffs and even closures of some development studios like Volition and Free Radical Design. However, in this case, there is no need to panic.
Changes on the official website may simply result from redesigning it. It's even possible that this is happening as part of preparations for the official announcement of the studio's new project. The Piranha Bytes website has not been updated for a long time. Before it was replaced with the team logo, the last message from September 2021 announced the upcoming release of Elex II.
The disappearance of WIKI6 from the list of projects co-financed by the German federal authorities also does not necessarily mean anything terrible. Only currently supported games are listed there. After backing ends, they are removed from that list. As part of this program, Piranha Bytes received 3 million EUR and it's rather difficult to expect that the project will be granted another subsidy, especially since the pool of funds for developer support planned for 2024 has been reduced from 70 million to 48.7 million.
The only real disturbing fact is the lack of updates to the YouTube channel. However, the studio's official profile on X (formerly Twitter) continues to post new content. Moreover, judging by LinkedIn, the number of Piranha Bytes staff has not changed significantly in recent months, so there's no reason to assume that mass layoffs in the Embracer group will also affect this studio.
