Daniel Erickson, CCO of Thought Pennies studio, recently announced that staff had been laid off and an upcoming game canceled. "Over the last three years at Thought Pennies we built something amazing", he wrote on LinkedIn. "We never missed a milestone, our feedback was great, our partnerships strong. We went from two people and a PowerPoint to a team of almost sixty heavily-vetted, incredibly independent, passionate professionals. Our publisher changed strategic direction, however, and our previous project is now without funding."
That project was apparently a Warhammer game. It's tough to say whether it would have been set in Warhammer Fantasy or Age of Sigmar based on mentions in the LinkedIn profiles of its developers, but what they do call it is a "cancelled fantasy live service RPG in Unreal 5", a "3rd person ARPG", and a "Co-Op PvE Action RPG with a cast of unique heroes and playstyles".
While I'm all for more Warhammer RPGs, we've already got Vermintide 2 for co-op PVE . And it's tough to be too disappointed about another live service game being canceled, given that it seems to happen every other week. Still, it's a shame that so many developers lost their jobs because an unnamed publisher changed its ideas about "strategic direction".
It's worth noting that, while it's been reported elsewhere that Games Workshop was responsible for pulling the funding that resulted in this cancellation, that's not how licence agreements work. Studios and publishers pay licence holders to use their intellectual property rather than the other way around—it's on the publisher whether they continue funding a new live service game after seeing a rash of failures and cancellations in the genre.
