Starbreeze Says It's Trying to Reach a Solution for Overkill's The Walking Dead After Skybound Terminated Contract

Yesterday,Skybound Entertainment announced that it was ending its contract with Starbreeze Publishingwhich allowed the latter company to utilizeThe Walking DeadIP for its gameOverkill’s The Walking Dead. In the process of voiding this contract, it essentially ended all hope ofthe game’s future console releasealong with discontinuing to the already-released PC version.

Now, Starbreeze has responded to the news and says it is still actively trying to salvage the relationship with Skybound. In a new message posted on Stabreeze’s website, it was said that the publisher is still trying to reach a solution that will allowOverkill’s The Walking Deadto continue onward. Starbreeze also listed the sales from the fourth quarter of 2018, which were incredibly underwhelming.

Starbreeze’s statement in full on its website said the following:

Starbreeze has a dialogue with Skybound with the ambition to reach a solution. Starbreeze has been informed that the product likely will be disabled for further sales on the platform Steam and should Starbreeze and Skybound not reach a solution, it would mean that the game will not be made available for sale again on Steam, and that the console version would not be released.

Sales related to OTWD amounted to SEK 34.1 million in the fourth quarter 2018. Costs related to development of OTWD has so far exceeded revenue. There are no assets related to OTWD in Starbreeze Group balance sheet.

While Starbreeze doesn’t want to give up onOverkill’s The Walking Deadjust yet, it seems like Skybound is just sort of done working with them at this point. In a statement from yesterday, Skybound said that the finished product ofOverkill’s The Walking Deadnever reached the standards they were promised. We concurred with this sentiment, asseen in our own review.

Whether Starbreeze and Skybound will be able to work things out remains to be seen but that possibility doesn’t seem likely. As was mentioned in the above statement,Overkill’s The Walking Deadhas also now been removed from Steam, so the ability to purchase the game has already been lost.

It’s beena rough few months for Starbreezeand considering it hasn’t even recouped its costs put into developingOverkill’s The Walking Deadis likely going to hurt the publishing company for the foreseeable future. If this story develops any further, we’ll let you know.