After developing video games for over 11 years, Danish game developer Full Control has decided to halt production of new video game properties.

“After releasing ten games with considerable critical and commercial success, we’ve made the difficult decision that the release of Space Hulk: Ascension will be our last one,” says Full Control founder and CEO Thomas Hentschel Lund. “We simply wanted to stop when we were at the top of our game.”

The loss of an investor, lack of funding for new games and increased competition are a few reasons why the state of the industry anno 2015 is an incredibly hard climate in which to maintain an independent studio. Instead of running the company against a wall, Lund made the decision to have Full Control cease game production, reduce staff and focus on sales and community support for its existing games instead.

It was a sudden chance and the ambition of becoming a medium-sized game developer that spurred Thomas Hentschel Lund into action more than ten years ago. In 2004, he founded the Danish company Full Control, which has since become known primarily for their work with existing IP’s, such as their video game adaptation of the classic Games Workshop board game Space Hulk and their remake of the old action RPG and fan favourite Jagged Alliance.

For a decade, Full Control moved steadily in the right direction, until a series of unforeseen events forced Thomas Lund to gradually start laying off most of the company’s entire staff of 25 developers towards the end of 2014.

The story about the company’s sudden staff reduction starts with the release of the Jagged Alliance remake Jagged Alliance: Flashback. The game never became a commercial hit, and the future potential of the franchise worsened when the German IP holder bitComposer filed for bankruptcy in December 2014. Simultaneously, Full Control was unable to secure funding for new projects that the development team could transition to, which resulted in the workforce being cut by half, according to Thomas Lund.

With half of its employees remaining and the sequel to Space Hulk, Space Hulk: Ascension, doing very well, Full Control looked like it might just be able to steer safely through the rough waters. But another storm was lurking ahead, as Full Control had to renegotiate a new exit agreement with their investor CAPNOVA; a very time- and resource-consuming process.

This complicated the situation even further, and with both unknown sales and an unknown exit plan ahead, Thomas Lund decided that Full Control had no other choice but to lay off the company’s remaining staff.

“My budgets only run until April, and renegotiating a new exit agreement with our investor took three months. It is all settled now, and CAPNOVA is no longer part of Full Control,” says Lund. “They do leave behind a loan which I must repay, however. The loan costs alone took away too much money to sustain a production team so all in all, ‘stopping at the top’ seems like the most sensible decision at this point.”

Thomas Lund observes that one of the current funding problems that he and other independent developers face is investors’ lack of interest in premium games, as well as the scarcity of publishers with money to spend.

”The processes required to fund a project stretching over 6-12 months with no guarantee of success, the proliferation of PC games and an increase in the amount of medium-sized studios pitching for projects makes it hard to balance burn rates with new funding while also delivering the game in production,” explains Lund. “We simply did not have that last 1 % of luck securing a new signed project in time, even with several pitches having been greenlit.”

Thomas Lund has accepted a position as Head of Production at Sybo Games two floors up in the same building in central Copenhagen that houses Full Control. It was the perfect opportunity for him to use all of his experience and get to work with a top-notch production that is only too rarely available in the games industry due to money constraints.

“Throughout my career, I have shipped around 15 games and more than 200 software products, and I don’t want to start from scratch again. The position at Sybo is very similar to what I have been doing at here at Full Control, in terms of managing all internally produced games at the company, which they can now benefit from. And I have become a part of one of the currently most promising Danish game studios out there so everybody wins,” he says.

In retrospect, Thomas Lund does not regret taking the chance when it presented itself to him back in the day.

“I pushed the speeder. I wanted to launch this rocket. I wanted to get a development studio up and running that would exist alongside international middle-sized studios. We just didn’t succeed in the long term, even after releasing three bigger PC titles over the last few years,” reflects Lund. “But at least I have enough control of my budgets to be able to ‘land’ the entire company and avoid bankruptcy. Even though we will not be producing any more content after May, I want Full Control to continue selling the Space Hulk and Jagged Alliance games and providing community support for several years to come.”

Thomas Lund is currently working on new third-party deals to launch Space Hulk and Space Hulk: Ascension on new platforms. “PS3, Vita and Wii U ports of Space Hulk will become available this summer, and I am working on getting it released for Android, Windows Phone too. Space Hulk: Ascension would be a potential great fit for the new console generation as well, so I am looking at that possibility. DLC for the game, as well as a new game mode currently in production, will also be released this spring.”