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Wish Studios closing down

Brighton-based indie developer shutters, leading to 13 redundancies

Indie developer Wish Studios is closing its business, resulting in the redundancies of 13 full-time staff.

The announcement comes after Wish failed to find a publisher for one of its new projects, alongside a fruitless search for additional investment.

Founded in 2012 by Caspar Field, Tom Bennett and Paul Brooke, the Brighton-based studio was the first to develop games for Sony's PlayLink.

It received a GamesIndustry.biz Best Place to Work Award two years in a row, and at its peak employed over 35 people on-site.

"We are deeply saddened at having to close Wish, after six-and-a-half years of making great games," said CEO Caspar Field.

"Our ethos was to put the team and their creativity at the heart of everything we did; having to say goodbye to those people has been an unbelievably difficult thing to do. It is truly heartbreaking.

"We would like to thank the Wish team, past and present, for their incredible contributions, and hope that they'll carry the best of what Wish was into their future careers.

"We'd also like to thank Sony for believing in the PlayLink concept, and, more than anything else, we'd like to thank all those who played and enjoyed our games - because that's what it's all about."

It's the latest in a string of bad news for the wider games industry which this week alone has seen layoffs at GOG.com and the announced closure of Techland's publishing division.

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Ivy Taylor avatar
Ivy Taylor: Ivy joined GamesIndustry.biz in 2017 having previously worked as a regional journalist, and a political campaigns manager before that. They are also one of the UK's foremost Sonic the Hedgehog apologists.
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