Veteran game designer Jake Solomon, known mostly for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, XCOM 2, and Marvel's Midnight Suns, announced the closure of Midsummer Studios. Solomon had founded the development team after leaving Firaxis. In 2024, I interviewed him to learn more about his next game, a narrative-driven life simulation for which he had already raised $6 million in seed funding.
Rather than going for a traditional sandbox-like approach in the vein of the king of the genre, The Sims from Maxis, the game was conceived around player-driven storytelling. It was a systems-based approach where conflict, relationships, and consequences would combine to generate compelling, episodic personal stories. Characters would have jobs, love lives, and competing desires, with failure treated not as a dead end but as a narrative opportunity, in the spirit of improv theater. There would be no game-over screen.
The game was designed to be open-ended and ongoing, with no fixed conclusion, and Solomon expressed hopes that a thriving modding community would emerge over time. It would have been a single-player experience only, built in Unreal Engine 5 with a stylized visual approach, deliberately designed to keep the team small and the production sustainable.
The closure announcement came directly from Solomon, who wrote a post on X and also shared a brief Pre-Alpha footage of the game, which was codenamed "Burbank":
We built a studio, we made a game, and I'm really proud of both. Before we close the doors at Midsummer Studios, I'd like to share a glimpse of Burbank, the game we poured our hearts into. It's like "Life Sims + The Truman Show," but it's more than that. I believe people are storytellers, and I want them to share whatever stories and characters they can dream up. Burbank lets you do that.
We have moments playing this game where characters come alive in a way we've never experienced. And for an old game developer like me that's special. What you're about to see is definitely pre-alpha. But this game was a dream of mine, our team made it come true, so watch and dream with us.
Solomon later admitted that Burbank's characters used AI for memory, reasoning, and speech, allowing players to create any characters they wanted and drop them into any story. The art, however, was entirely human-made.
It's yet another closure at a dire time for the gaming industry. Just yesterday, Sony shut down Bluepoint Games, the maker of the Demon's Souls remake. However, Solomon's studio has perhaps more in common with the "extinction level event" that was mentioned by Denis Dyack: the failed $2 billion deal between Embracer Group and Savvy Group, which flooded the market with prototypes of AA and AAA games, thus making it much harder for indie studios to get funding.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
