Tim Sweeney shares the time he called a beloved studio's death "economically realistic"

You can trace the lineage of beloved games like Deus Ex, BioShock, and Dishonored directly back to Looking Glass Studios. This developer is one of the most notable in the history of the game industry, having effectively created the immersive sim genre through classics like Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief. However, the studio's closure in 2000 wasn't really "sad," at least according to Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. It was simply a matter of economics.

"This isn't a sad day, it's an economically realistic day," Sweeney wrote on May 24, 2000. "Looking Glass spent lots of money making innovative games that never sold well." This quote recently resurfaced on social media, as gamers looking to hate Sweeney move beyond simply criticizing his mass layoffs, his bizarre jabs at Valve boss Gabe Newell, and Epic's increasingly AI-first approach to development.

Now, if I were a major industry figure who'd once written something callous about a beloved studio's demise, I think I'd do what I could to minimize the reach of that quote. I'd ignore it. If it spread too far, I'd apologize. I'd say I had grown over the course of the decades, and that I no longer believe as I once did.

Sweeney, however, retweeted his old quote today, saying "The crash in the game business nowadays is the first for the new generation of gamers, but only one of several in the history of games. Here are my thoughts from 2000 when a maker of beloved but long-unprofitable games went under."

With Sweeney already an unpopular figure among a segment of the gaming community, you can imagine how well this post has gone down. "The point of these posts is not to be popular; of course the most popular thing to do would be to lament the troubles in the game business as sad acts of nature and vaguely blame 'the system,'" Sweeney says. "I post because it's important for people in prominent positions to speak up on the root causes of what is happening in this crash as it evolves."

While Sweeney doesn't reference it directly, the recent shutdown of BioWare offers a sad mirror to Looking Glass's death decades ago. Another studio that made games in a niche genre for niche fans, building beloved titles at unsustainable budgets until the bottom fell out.

At least, that's one way you could look at BioWare's end. You could also see the studio's story like this: an unimpeachable maker of the best role-playing games in the world until it was bought by EA. Under the publisher, Mass Effect and Dragon Age built a core fanbase which would ultimately be alienated by pushes for broader market appeal, and what fans remained would be pushed away by Anthem's failed live-service push and a seemingly unending development hell for Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Meanwhile, one of BioWare's OG franchises would find itself under a new developer without a corporate mandate to cater to the masses, and we'd get an RPG megahit in the form of Baldur's Gate 3. Without corporate pressure, could the BioWare of today have made its own Baldur's Gate 3? I don't know, but I am confident that saying studio shutdowns are a process of natural selection is just as simplistic as blaming "the system."

"Projects and teams that are not producing profitable games are being axed," Sweeney's message in 2000 continued. "Origin's projects (minus [Ultima Online]) and Looking Glass are only the beginning. Some of the companies and teams that will take the axe damn will deserve it, and others are unfortunately made up of really good guys who just haven't had the good fortune of producing hits. This is the bit where the comet hits the earth and the dinosaurs die, but the way is cleared for cooler life forms to evolve."

To extend Sweeney's old metaphor, the problem here is that Earth hasn't actually managed to produce any cooler life form that's cooler than a dinosaur. Sure, primates proved to be much hardier and more adaptable over the course of eons, but survival is not the ultimate measure of success. I guess when you're raking in billions off of AI-generated content and reheated pastiches of other people's creative work, it's easy to think Fortnite is the only game in the world that matters.

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