King of Meat

» see kingofmeat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Glowmade was founded in Guildford by Jonny Hopper along with Mike Green and Adam Sibbick, all of them out of Lionhead and the Fable years. Guildford is the English town where a disproportionate share of the British games industry has lived since the 1980s, and Lionhead's closure in 2016 scattered a lot of experienced people into small studios exactly like this one. Amazon Games signed them, revealed King of Meat at Gamescom in August 2024, and put it out on 7 October 2025.

The pitch was a four-player cooperative dungeon crawler wrapped in a fake television show, where the dungeons themselves were made by players with a level editor. Hopper cited Labyrinth and professional wrestling as the reference points, which tells you the tone better than any genre label would. The design problem the team set themselves, in Hopper's own words, was that it had to be hard to make something bad.

Reviews landed in the middle. Metacritic came out between 70 and 75 depending on the platform, and OpenCritic had 59 percent of critics recommending it. Nothing in that range kills a game. The players did that by not showing up.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the number ~

320 concurrent players on Steam at peak. The internal expectation reported afterward was in the region of a hundred thousand. That is not a shortfall, it is a rounding error against the target, and it happened to a game with a Gamescom reveal, a major publisher behind it and a promotional push that ran through the industry's biggest presenter.

There is no mystery cause on the record. Nothing was review bombed and nothing fell over at launch. A user-generated-content game needs a crowd before it can generate anything, and the crowd is the one thing a level editor cannot manufacture for you. Roughly a dozen people at Glowmade lost their jobs.

~ the refund ~

Amazon did something in the shutdown that almost nobody does. On 23 February 2026 the game came off every storefront and in-game Stamp purchases were disabled. Then it refunded every player who had bought it, automatically, through whichever platform they had bought it on, processed over the six and a half weeks between the announcement and the closure. If you had it installed you could keep playing until the end.

The notice on the site was short and did not dress anything up. The game had not found the audience they hoped for, so they were concluding their investment in it. Nothing further was planned, down to the bug fixes. Servers offline on 9 April 2026 and the game unplayable from that moment, since there was no offline mode to fall back on.

~ what happened after ~

Glowmade is still going. In August 2026 the studio announced Rogue Fortune, a smaller game built on the idea that your gold is also your health bar. Amazon Games, in the same week it killed King of Meat, also dropped its publishing deal with Maverick Games, which suggests the decision was a portfolio decision rather than a verdict on one dungeon crawler.

The domain kingofmeat.com is still up as I write this. It answers 200 and serves nothing but the closure notice and the refund schedule, which makes it one of the better-documented deaths of the year and a rare case of a company leaving its own obituary online rather than pointing the domain at a marketing page.

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