Mimimi Games

» see mimimi.games as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Mimimi Games announced its own closure on 29 August 2023, twelve days after putting Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew on sale. The post sat on the studio's own site under the heading Our Final Game, signed by Johannes Roth, one of the two people who started the company. Almost nothing in it is about failure, which is what makes it unusual.

Roth and Dominik Abé had been working together under the name Mimimi since October 2008, while they were still studying game design, and they registered Mimimi Productions as a partnership on 13 January 2011. Their first commercial release, The Last Tinker: City of Colors, came out in 2014 and did not make them famous. The studio's own account of that period says they came dangerously close to bankruptcy before the next game landed.

The next game was Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, published by Daedalic in 2016, and it is the reason anybody outside Munich knows the name. Desperados III followed in 2020 under THQ Nordic, with a standalone Shadow Tactics expansion the year after that, and then Shadow Gambit, which Mimimi published itself. By November 2021 the studio employed 38 people. It never got bigger than that, and it never needed to.

The genre Mimimi worked in was already a museum piece when they picked it up. Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines was everywhere in Turkey around 1999 and 2000, passed around on burned discs, unforgiving in a way that meant ten-minute attempts at a save point you had already memorized. Then the genre simply stopped existing for about fifteen years. A German studio restarted it with ninjas, and the restart worked well enough that two more games followed it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the letter ~

The closure post is specific in a way these things rarely are. Roth wrote that future production costs were growing faster than the revenue the genre could return, and that the financial pressure and the level of risk had stopped being sustainable. Then he wrote the sentence that most of the coverage led with: that a decade and a half of increasingly ambitious games had taken a heavy personal toll on the founders and their families.

The decision described there is not a closure forced from outside. After Shadow Gambit shipped, they chose to stop rather than sign up for another multi-year cycle, and the post says the studio would ramp down slowly over the following months. December 2023 is when that finished.

~ what stayed finished ~

Three real-time tactics games and one expansion, all of them complete, none of them cancelled mid-production. That is a rarer exit than it sounds for a studio of this size. Hooded Horse took over publishing Shadow Gambit in December 2024, so the last game is still sold by somebody.

~ the site that is still up ~

mimimi.games still answers. The title tag reads "Making games and crying about it, 2008 to 2023", the team page is gone, and the social links are split into active channels and legacy channels. Someone is still renewing that domain so a sentence about the studio can sit there in the past tense.

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