'We got stabbed in the back': How Rune 2 survived one of the worst game launches in years The day after Rune 2 launched, developer Human Head Studios closed its doors. But that was just the beginning.
Some game launches go smoothly, and some don't. Very few go as spectacularly wrong as last year's rollout of Rune 2. More than two years after it was announced, the game launched on the Epic Games Store on November 12, 2019—and on November 13, developer Human Head Studios closed its doors, leaving the game orphaned on day one. As if that weren't bizarre enough, Human Head resurfaced the very same day as Bethesda Softworks-owned Roundhouse Studios.
"Rune 2 will be the final game for Human Head Studios," community manager Katherine Stull wrote on the
Human Head blog at the time. "After 22 great years of making games as an independent studio, economic realities have forced us to make the decision to wind down the company and close its doors. But while we are closing the book on Human Head, we are not closing the book on the amazing team we have assembled."
Stull explained that Human Head contacted Bethesda and negotiated the opening of Roundhouse Studios, which picked up its entire former staff. Human Head and Bethesda had an existing relationship, though not an entirely positive one. Human Head was the studio that fought with Bethesda over the original version of Prey 2, which the publisher
ultimately cancelled before rebooting the series with Arkane Studios instead.
Before Rune 2 released, things weren't exactly looking peachy for Human Head. In 2019, its game Survived By
was cancelled while in Early Access, and in 2018 it released The Quiet Man with Square Enix, a game
we called "spectacularly bad."
I reached out to the new Roundhouse Studios and its co-founders Ben Gokey and Chris Rhinehart for more information on the sudden dissolution of Human Head and its dispute with Ragnarok Game LLC, the company that published Rune 2, but received no response. Efforts to contact Human Head's legal representatives, as recommended by Bethesda, also went nowhere. Whatever the reasons for the surprise shutdown, though, the bottom line for publisher Ragnarok is that it was, in every possible way, a disaster.
"If you want to tank a game ... this is probably the playbook on how to do it," Ragnarok general counsel Sam Goldberg told me in a recent interview. "Show up for no marketing, don't support streamers, make an announcement the day after the game launched that you're no longer going to work on it and you've joined some competitive company—I mean, what more could they do?"
Human Head told Ragnarok that it was shutting down on November 7, less than a week before Rune 2 was set to go live. It refused to say why it was closing so suddenly, Rune 2 executive producer Matt Candler said, and did not allow the publisher to attempt to hire any of its employees as contractors. The developer agreed to support the game post-launch while Ragnarok worked out a longer-term plan, but Candler said Human Head ghosted them on that, too.
"We did a ton of great work, set up a lot of interviews and a lot of streams, spent a lot of money, and they never showed up," Candler said. "We launched the game ourselves, we had a great day on November 12. We got initially, really strong reviews about the game, saying that this is kind of a cool indie game. And then Wednesday morning, the 13th, the first thing I see is people saying, look, Bethesda makes an announcement that they've founded a new studio in Madison, and all the employees of Human Head are now employees of Roundhouse Studios, a Bethesda studio."
Making the timing even more surprising, Human Head left behind money by bailing out early: Candler claimed the studio would have earned $67,000 on the final milestone, due after release, and another $110,000 for supporting the game post-launch.
"They could've kept their mouth shut and collected the money, and we would've been like, yup, here you go. And we would've gotten through a successful launch together," Candler said. "We could've transitioned the game if they weren't able to participate anymore, we could've transitioned naturally—here's the source code, we'll help you find somebody. But they didn't do that. They actually did everything they could to prevent us from supporting the product."
Candler immediately began reaching out to all the top Unreal developers he knew, attempting to put together a team to keep the game going. Several expressed interest, but the recovery effort was hampered by yet another bizarre twist: Most of the developers Candler spoke to wanted to look at the source code and assets to evaluate the scope of the job, but according to Goldberg, Human Head wouldn't hand it over at first.
“They refused to give us the source code that was our property, to be able to update and fix the game for the community,” Goldberg said. “So not only do they abandon us—full stop, full abandonment, total stab in the back—I mean, again, who does that? But then we don't even have our property, the source code, to be able to update the game.”
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Ragnarok's ongoing lawsuit against Human Head . The company is seeking restitution of financing for the game's development and at least $100 million in compensation.
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