Possibility Space

» see possibility.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Jeff Strain has a long record. He was an engineer at Blizzard before co-founding ArenaNet, where Guild Wars came out of, and he later founded Undead Labs and made State of Decay. In 2021 he and Annie Delisi Strain set up Prytania Media in New Orleans as a holding company for several new studios, with a stated plan to hire and mentor people from backgrounds the industry usually walks past. Possibility Space was the flagship.

It was distributed from the start, with staff scattered across several countries and an office in Louisiana as the center of gravity. Strain told IGN they were building a AAA title. Nothing beyond that was ever shown publicly, no trailer and no name, which in hindsight is the only concrete thing anyone outside the studio can say about the product.

Crop Circle Games, the sibling studio under the same parent, went first. There were layoffs and furloughs in February 2024 and the studio closed in late March, with Annie Delisi Strain publishing an open letter about industry conditions and a cold investment market, alongside a personal health diagnosis.

A couple of weeks after that, on 12 April, Jeff Strain sent an email to the staff of Possibility Space telling them the studio was shut, effective immediately. Access to internal systems was cut around the same time. The reason given in the memo was a cancelled publishing arrangement and internal leaks to a reporter at Kotaku named Ethan Gach. The article he was describing had not run yet.

~ the dossier ~

~ the email ~

Studios close constantly and most of them close quietly, with a statement and thirty days of severance. What made this one travel was the sequence. An owner shut a company and named a journalist as the cause in writing, before that journalist had published anything, to an audience of people who had just lost their jobs and now had a reason not to talk to anyone.

Coverage was fast and uniformly hostile. Game Developer, PC Gamer, Aftermath and Massively OP all ran it within a day, and the framing across every one of them was some version of the same question: how does a report that does not exist yet close a studio?

~ nothing to inherit ~

Most dead studios leave something behind. There is a game with a Metacritic page, or at minimum a Steam entry that keeps quietly selling to somebody. Possibility Space has neither. Three years of salaries, a logo, a few interviews, and whatever is sitting on a repository that the people who wrote it lost access to on a Friday afternoon.

The usual line here would be about something that stayed American and never made it to my side of the map. It would be true, and it would also miss what happened. Nobody anywhere used it. It was never finished and never shown, so it enters the register as a company instead of as a thing, and the only people who can describe what it actually was are the ones who got that email.

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