Work on all versions of Overkill’s The Walking Dead is discontinued – Update

Skybound, the entertainment company that manages the rights to The Walking Dead, has terminated its contract with Starbreeze Studios with immediate effect. Work on all versions of Overkill’s The Walking Dead game is halted. That means the console versions won’t come out.

Skybound announces on its website that all efforts surrounding Overkill’s The Walking Dead are being stopped and that its contract with Starbreeze Studios has been terminated. The company says the game does not live up to its standards and that the promised quality has not been delivered. Skybound says it shares the disappointment of fans with the game.

In 2014, Skybound signed a contract with Starbreeze Studios. The latter was given the responsibility for creating and releasing a co-op action game based on The Walking Dead theme. Skybound says it did its best to work with Starbreeze to solve all the problems it saw around the game, but it didn’t succeed.

The breach of contract means that console versions of Overkill’s The Walking Dead will no longer be released. Sony had already started refunding PlayStation 4 owners who pre-ordered the game in February. The publisher of the console version, 505 Games, denied at the time that the game had been deleted. Earlier this year, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game were already delayed to an unspecified date.

In November of last year, Overkill’s The Walking Dead was released on Steam. The game received poor reviews and sold poorly. There are also hardly any players active in the co-op zombie game. It is not yet clear what exactly will happen to the version on Steam. In any case, further development of the game has been stopped. The game is currently for sale on the Valve platform.

Starbreeze, which achieved success with Payday 2, is in serious financial trouble due to the vicissitudes surrounding the failed zombie game. The company is in the process of restructuring. At the end of January, Eurogamer published a background article about ‘the fall’ of Starbreeze. In it, developers talk about the problems with the development.

Update 10:56: Starbreeze tells Eurogamer that Overkill’s The Walking Dead will soon be leaving Steam. The publisher does say that it is still in negotiations with Skybound to release the second ‘season’ of the game. That additional content to be released as DLC was part of the Deluxe version of the game.