Games veteran Ron Gilbert has stopped developing his untitled RPG project, once described as “classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park.”
During a recent interview with Ars Technica, Gilbert expanded on various issues during production, including a small three-person team and a lack of funding support.
“I just [didn’t] have the money or the time to build a big open-world game like that,” he noted. “It’s either a passion project you spent ten years on, or you just need a bunch of money to be able to hire people and resources.”
Gilbert explained that he had pitched the concept, but “the deals that publishers were offering were just horrible.”
“Doing a pixelated old-school Zelda thing isn’t the big, hot item, so publishers look at us, and they didn’t look at it as ‘we’re gonna make $100 million and it’s worth investing in’,” he said.
“The amount of money they’re willing to put up and the deals they were offering just made absolutely no sense to me to go do this.”
He went on to note how publishers “are very analytics-driven” which makes it difficult to pitch concepts compared to when he started his career.
“They have formulas that they apply to games to try to figure out how much money they could make, and in the end you end up giving a whole lot of games that look exactly the same as last year’s games, because that makes some money,” Gilbert explained.
“When we were starting out, we couldn’t do that because we didn’t know what made this money, so it was a lot more experimenting.”
He continued: “That’s why I really enjoy the indie game market because it’s kind of free of a lot of that stuff that big publishers bring to it, and there’s a lot more creativity, strangeness, and bizarreness.”
Gilbert’s untitled RPG was announced in 2024, and had been in development for several months. It was slated for release later that year or in early 2025.
