Veteran game designer Jake Solomon , known mostly for XCOM: Enemy Unknown , XCOM 2 , and Marvel's Midnight Suns , announced the closure of Midsummer Studios . Solomon had founded the development team after leaving Firaxis . In 2024, I interviewed him to learn more about his next game , a narrative-driven life simulation for which he had already raised $6 million in seed funding.
Rather than going for a traditional sandbox-like approach in the vein of the king of the genre, The Sims from Maxis , the game was conceived around player-driven storytelling. It was a systems-based approach where conflict, relationships, and consequences would combine to generate compelling, episodic personal stories . Characters would have jobs, love lives, and competing desires, with failure treated not as a dead end but as a narrative opportunity, in the spirit of improv theater. There would be no game-over screen . The game was designed to be open-ended and ongoing , with no fixed conclusion , and Solomon expressed hopes that a thriving modding community would emerge over time. It would have been a single-player experience only, built in Unreal Engine 5 with a stylized visual approach, deliberately designed to keep the team small and the production sustainable.
The closure announcement came directly from Solomon, who and also shared a brief Pre-Alpha footage of the game, which was codenamed " Burbank ":
We built a studio, we made a game, and I'm really proud of both. Before we close the doors at Midsummer Studios, I'd like to share a glimpse of Burbank, the game we poured our hearts into. It's like "Life Sims + The Truman Show," but it's more than that. I believe people are storytellers, and I want them to share whatever stories and characters they can dream up. Burbank lets you do that.
We have moments playing this game where characters come alive in a way we've never experienced. And for an old game developer like me that's special. What you're about to see is definitely pre-alpha. But this game was a dream of mine, our team made it come true, so watch and dream with us.
Solomon later admitted that Burbank's characters used AI for memory, reasoning, and speech , allowing players to create any characters they wanted and drop them into any story. The art, however, was entirely human-made.
It's yet another closure at a dire time for the gaming industry. Just yesterday, Sony shut down Bluepoint Games , the maker of the Demon's Souls remake . However, Solomon's studio has perhaps more in common with the "extinction level event" that was mentioned by Denis Dyack : the failed $2 billion deal between Embracer Group and Savvy Group , which flooded the market with prototypes of AA and AAA games , thus making it much harder for indie studios to get funding.
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