United Front Games

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

~ the eulogy ~

United Front was founded in Vancouver in 2007 by people coming out of EA Black Box, Rockstar Vancouver, Radical Entertainment and Volition. That is the standard origin for a British Columbia studio of that decade. A large studio contracts or closes, the senior staff have mortgages in the same city, and a new company appears within walking distance of the old one.

The first game was ModNation Racers in 2010 for Sony, a kart racer built around letting players make their own tracks. It was competent and it sold reasonably and it is not why anyone remembers the studio. What made the name was the rescue job that came next.

True Crime: Hong Kong had been in development for Activision and was canceled outright in early 2011, at the point where most games simply disappear. Square Enix bought the rights that August, and in August 2012 the same team shipped it as Sleeping Dogs. It reviewed well, it sold well, and it did the thing open world games almost never do, which is make a specific real city feel like it was made by people who had been there. A studio that gets a canceled game across the line under a new publisher has proved something that a studio with a clean run never has to.

In 2016 I was working as an engineer in Ankara and studio closures in British Columbia were not news that reached me. What reads clearly from any distance is the timing. A company does not decide to close three weeks after a launch. The decision is older than the launch, which means the people who put Smash+Grab out in September were finishing work for a company that had already been decided against, and were the last to know it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the borrowed franchises ~

Almost nothing United Front made was United Front's. ModNation belonged to Sony and LittleBigPlanet Karting in 2012 was somebody else's series again. Sleeping Dogs belonged to Square Enix, and before that to Activision. In 2014 the studio did support work on Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which is the least visible kind of contract there is, and shipped a Definitive Edition of its own game for a publisher that owned it.

That is a working business right up until it is not. A studio with no property of its own has no asset to sell and nothing to fall back on when a publisher changes its mind, and the two projects it did own were the two that went wrong. Triad Wars, an online game set in the Sleeping Dogs world announced in 2014, had its beta shut down in January 2016 without ever launching. Smash+Grab went into Steam Early Access that September.

~ the last month ~

On 17 October 2016 United Front announced it was closing. There was no reason given, then or later. Around 145 people were out of work, in a studio in Yaletown, and Smash+Grab came off Steam. A Sleeping Dogs sequel that had reportedly been in the building went with it.

The silence is the part worth recording. Studios that close usually say something, even if it is a sentence about market conditions, because the people who worked there need something to show the next employer. United Front said nothing at all, and what filled the gap was press reports and employee posts, which is how everyone outside the building found out in the first place. Nine years of work, one of the better open world games of its console generation, and no closing statement.

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