Underworld Ascendant's release back in November was just as disastrous as it appeared to be on launch day. The game reviewed horribly and has sold virtually zero copies. A month after its release, OtherSide published a pathetic mea culpa, finally revealing that their original funding partner had bailed shortly after the game's Kickstarter in 2015 and they they'd spent most of its four and a half years of development spinning their wheels. But no matter how bad Ascendant may have looked throughout its development, there'd always been reason to believe that OtherSide Austin's System Shock 3 would not suffer a similar fate, thanks to its seemingly ironclad $12M publishing arrangement with Swedish publisher Starbreeze Studios.

You know, the same Starbreeze that filed for administration and was raided by the authorities for insider trading back in December, following years of mismanagement. Yeah...for a while it looked like the System Shock 3 deal might actually survive all that, but today the inevitable happened. Not only have Starbreeze cancelled their arrangement with OtherSide, but they appear to be demanding all of their money back in exchange for returning the game's publishing rights. Here's their press release:


Notice the absence of an actual quote from the other party in there. OtherSide have yet to publicly respond to these events, and I'm not sure they ever will. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like unless they have another published lined up they're probably toast.