In 2011, Mark Spenner founded the gaming studio “Rumble” (Towers & Titans). However, a month ago, the CEO passed away from cancer. Then everything happened very quickly. The owner Forte shut down the studio. All employees were laid off in a Zoom call that lasted 5 minutes.
How was the studio closed? Web architect David Bethune writes on LinkedIn:
We were just all laid off and received a month’s salary as severance – this happened in a Zoom call that lasted 5 minutes.
The developer Forte recently closed the studio “Phoenix Labs” (Dauntless) in exactly the same way.
Bethune says: Now that he is no longer working in the field, he can say that the gaming business and the last two owners have been absolutely ruthless.
The corporations would be “chasing mythical future profits” while disposing of the teams that do the actual work. He is tired of worrying about his career and his bank account.
The owner of Rumble, Forte, had previously closed the studio Phoenix Labs, known for Dauntless:
Studio closes just one month after the founder’s death
This makes the story particularly tragic: The end of the studio Rumble comes one month after the studio’s founder, Mark Spenner, passed away from cancer.
The design director Phillip Chung mourned Spenner (via LinkedIn) and described him as “the biggest pillar of Rumble” and the man one would never want to lose.
What did the studio do? Rumble was founded in 2011 by developers who previously worked at BioWare, EA, and Zynga. The studio primarily designed free-to-play mobile titles such as Towers & Titans. According to the company page, the team had more than 25 employees and worked from an office in San Francisco, California.
In 2015, the majority of the shares were sold to the Chinese company iDreamSky, apparently to gain access to the Chinese market (via gamedeveloper). You need a partner in China to distribute games there; otherwise, you won’t get a license.
Once the shares in one’s own company are sold and fate is no longer entirely in one’s own hands, it can apparently take strange turns, as the developers at Rumble observe.
As indicated by Bethune’s statements, he apparently did not even know which large corporation he belonged to. He only found out that they had the same parent company as Phoenix Labs, who faced the same fate as them in May 2024: A great MMO wanted to be like Monster Hunter World: Now the studio is facing closure
