Le Cirque Magique

Towards the end of development on Madness Returns the studio here in Shanghai announced to employees that it would shutting down. Closing doors. Laying off all staff. Dead. Finished. Despite best efforts to secure new business and financing, it seemed that nothing would come soon enough to avoid “The End”. The contract with EA (to develop Madness Returns) was ending and with it the development funding it contained. EA did not see the survival of Spicy Horse (beyond the end of the development contract) as their responsibility. This is normal. Publishers don’t usually care about work-for-hire developers, so long as they finish the job they are hired for. We were prepared to go out of existence and EA was fine with that. That’s how unimportant Spicy is to EA in the scheme of things post-release of the game. Again, this is normal. We could be angry at them, but there’s really no point. They didn’t sign up to support us indefinitely. This should give you some sense of the relationship that exists between developer and publisher.