Dear gamers
We at Volition have been making games for thirty years. That's a long time for any developer and not too many people out there can say they've been at it for as long as we have. We were never the most well-known studio. In fact, people are often surprised when they hear who made games like Descent and Red Faction. We don't blame you if you don't remember us. We're just glad you bought our games.
But now we have to address the six hundred pound gorilla in the room. Many of you are wondering why we're shutting down after thirty years of game development. Some people may point to the drop in quality of our games. Sure we've released games with a lot of bugs and glitches. But truth be told, that's an industry thing. Why the hell would we release a game that works when we can just dump it on the market and hope the fans of our biggest franchises take the time to patch it for us? Todd Howard does it and he was able to offload all of his failures onto Microsoft for seven and a half billion dollars. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
But that's not the reason why we're in the position we're in. We'll be the first to admit we dropped the ball during the production of the Saints Row series. Fans of the series said the first one was decent. It didn't really compare to Rockstar's GTA San Andreas which was released two years prior, but enough people liked it to justify a sequel. Enter Saints Row 2. People loved that game. In fact, many of our fans say that's where the series peaked. They praised it for having just the right amount of absurdity to set it apart from other GTA clones. So when we made Saints Row the Third, we decided to crank the absurdity up. Like, way up. Admittedly the reactions were mixed because the series took you away from the slightly goofy, yet believable gangs of Stillwater and threw you into a new city run by devil worshippers, cyber punks, and luchadores. But at least you could go on mayhem missions where you could massacre furries.
Then Saints Row 4 came out. You know, the funny thing about colleges is they tend to churn out liberal arts majors by the metric ass load. Those people needed to find jobs and that's where we came in. We spent roughly two years developing that game and in those two years, there were questions we should've asked ourselves. We should've asked ourselves "Why would the country's most notorious gang member, who committed numerous acts of terrorism on multiple occasions, run for office? Why would an alien that sounds like the stereotype of every English lit major attack earth? And why would fans of a game series centered around psychotic gang bangers want to hear a story about a 'puckish rogue' narrated by Jane Austen?" I guess we shouldn't have been surprised when GTA 5 was released less than a month later and everybody just kinda forgot about us.
We won't even discuss Agents of Mayhem because, quite honestly, we forgot it existed too.
But fast forward a few years and we found a yearning from our fans for a Saints Row reboot. We heard their voices and we put what was left of our dwindling resources into a final hurrah that would leave our fans stunned and clamoring for more of our homage to gang banging. So we assembled the finest English lit majors we could, Todd Howar'd our way through the development cycle, and released a steaming pile of crap that managed to unite both ends of the political gaming spectrum in hating us. Looking back on it, we should've listened to our fans when they told us during the development cycle that our game would be Saints Row in name only. We should've listened when our fans said that if they wanted to hear a shirtless gay dude, a chick with five different gender pronouns, and the Wish version of Steve Urkel bitch about capitalism, they'd go find some slam-poetry session on Youtube for free. Now will anyone pick the series up again? Who knows? But if they do, be sure to thank us for setting the bar so low that anything they put out will blow your expectations out of the water.
We at Volition would like to thank everyone who worked hard on our games over the years. But most importantly, we would like to thank our fans. As much as we would've loved to give you the games you wanted, you were a bunch of toxic shit lords who needed to be taught a lesson and we're glad we fucked our company into the dirt to teach it to you.
Farewell
