Jukai Studio, the developer of othe action-horror game Stray Souls has announced its shutdown.
This follows the closure (at least in its previous form) of the game's publisher Versus Evil.
According to the announcement made on X (formerly Twitter) the game's poor reception and the inability of supporting the company due to poor sales were the root cause behind its closure.
The Developers also claim they have suffered bullying online and legal action is being taken against it.
We hear that the core team of Jukai Studio included only two developers, while the rest of the work was outsourced.
You can read the statement in its entirety below.
After much contemplation and in light of today's news that our publisher has announced closure, we have decided not to delay in informing you that we are shutting down Jukai Studio.
Some of you may have noticed that our website has not been functioning for some time, and we have not been as active as before. There are many reasons for this, but one of the main ones is that we have fallen victim to cyberbullying, received a poor reception for our debut project Stray Souls, and were completely unable to sustain the company because of bad sales, leading to the decision having to be made this year.
We are aware that you had high expectations for Stray Souls, but we never informed you that only two core individuals, along with contracted personnel, were working on the game. We did everything in our power to bring the project to completion in the best possible form, but throughout the entire duration, we, our publisher staff, other publisher dev teams and our closed ones were constantly attacked by a cyber persecutor, and some of you, as our community, were also tormented with unwanted messages and emails. We understand that you did not wish to continue actively supporting us for the obvious reasons mentioned above. The matter is now in the hands of our lawyers, so we cannot speak about it any further, but know that we will not abandon it despite the studio's closure.
Once again, we wanted to thank all of you who supported us and did not give up despite the adversities that befell both you and us. We sincerely thank everyone for believing in us. No one from Jukai Studio has been laid off because we never functioned as a large corporation, and together we decided that each one of us will go their separate way.
Jukai Studio consisted of a truly amazing and talented group of people who believed in the success of the project until the end. Despite this sad news, Stray Souls remains in your hands. In conclusion, we want to add that this year has been very difficult not only for us, and we hope that 2024 will be a year of positive changes in the world of game development. Thank you to everyone who supported us.
Stray Souls is currently available for PC via Steam, where It currently has "mostly negative" reviews, with players criticizing the game mechanics, story, and several bugs.
This is not the first studio to close recently due to the poor reception of its game. The same happened to The Day Before developer Fntastic, albeit things doesn't look quite as bad here.
For now, it appears that Stray Souls is staying available on Steam for those who want to purchase it and play it, despite the closure of the studio that created it.
