Troika shuts its doors after weeks of rumours

Specialist RPG developer Troika Games has shut its doors, with final confirmation of the closure coming from co-CEO Leonard Boyarsky after weeks of industry rumour-mongering about the fate of the studio.

"As many of you may have already heard, Troika has laid off all of its employees and is closing its doors due to our inability to secure funding for future projects," Boyarsky wrote in an email posted on fan site No Mutants Allowed.

"We want to thank all of our fans for their support these past seven years," he continued, "it has really meant a lot to us that there were people out there who enjoyed our games enough to create fan-sites and follow our progress as a company."

Troika was created in 1998 by the design team who created classic RPG Fallout for Interplay, and went on to build three titles in the past six years - Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil, and most recently, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

Although critically acclaimed, the firm's titles were targeted at niche RPG markets, and failed to achieve significant commercial success - most significantly Bloodlines, which was based on the Half-Life 2 engine and whose release was doomed to obscurity by happening on the same Friday as Valve's long-awaited opus.