Liquid Swords, the Swedish studio Christofer Sundberg started in 2020 after co-founding Avalanche Studios and creating Just Cause, has been declared bankrupt. The Stockholm District Court made the decision on October 12, 2026, according to Swedish business outlet Breakit, which reports that the company had not paid salaries for several months. Nearly 30 people lose their jobs, six months after the release of Samson, the only game the studio ever shipped.
The petition came from the staff. Breakit reported on October 9 that employees had asked the court to declare the company insolvent after two months without pay, as relayed by Spanish outlet 3DJuegos. A court-appointed trustee now runs the business and, per Breakit, is hopeful about finding a buyer. No deal has been announced.
Sweden will cover the missing paychecks
Staff will be paid through Sweden's wage guarantee, the lönegaranti. The trustee works out what each employee is owed, and the Swedish Tax Agency pays it in place of the bankrupt employer. Stockholm's county administrative board says it covers wages from the three months before the bankruptcy petition, the period until the court rules and the first month afterward, capped at eight months and, at 2025 rates, SEK 235,200 per person.
A GTA-style city that launched broken
Samson: A Tyndalston Story is an open-world action game often compared to GTA IV. You play a man back in his hometown with a debt that grows every day from interest, taking jobs, fighting and driving to pay it down before his creditors go after his sister. It launched on PC on April 8, 2026, for $24.99, and reached PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on September 21.
Bugs defined the launch. The game holds a 51 out of 100 on Metacritic from 33 critic reviews, and only 56% of its 3,602 user reviews on Steam recommend it, a Mixed rating. Sundberg himself acknowledged after release that the studio had shipped a game with flaws, as VGC recalls. The team kept patching to the end, with a hotfix on October 1 and a balance update on October 8, four days before the bankruptcy ruling.
It is a familiar arc. MindsEye, Leslie Benzies' open-world game, was another studio founded by a veteran of big open-world games, and its rough launch also ended in layoffs.
Cuts came long before the collapse
When Liquid Swords announced an investment from NetEase Games on November 2, 2022, it did not disclose the amount but said it planned to reach 100 employees in 2023. The same release framed the studio as a step toward an industry without half-baked games and broken promises.
On February 17, 2025, still before launch, the studio announced layoffs, with Sundberg blaming shifting market conditions for missing its timeline. 3DJuegos puts that cut at around 45 people, roughly half the team. The nearly 30 who stayed are the ones losing their jobs now.
If you already own Samson
As of October 18, Samson is still listed on Steam at $24.99 with no notice on its store page. It is a single-player game with no online mode, and Liquid Swords had ruled out multiplayer, so it does not need studio servers to run. Saves sync through Steam Cloud, which Valve operates. Nothing suggests the game will stop working for people who bought it.
Future patches are another matter. In September the studio said it was considering more story content, and any of that now depends on someone buying the company or the rights to the game. This is a different problem from the one the Power To The Players Act targets, since that proposed US bill deals with games that die when their servers go dark. Samson will keep running, possibly with whatever bugs remain when updates stop.
The conversation starts here
Sign in with a supporter account to comment. Sign in
Nobody has commented yet. Want to go first?