Toki Tori dev Two Tribes closes after poor sales

Netherlands developer Two Tribes has been closed after 13 years following poor sales of its latest release Toki Tori 2.

In a blog post, the studio said the development team had been let go. The original founders Martijn Reuvers and Collin van Ginkel have stayed however to form a new development company to work on future titles.

The Two Tribes Publihsing firm, that owns and publishes its games and handles its contracts, is said to be unaffected by the closure.

Two Tribes said it had begun transitioning away from a work-for-hire studio in 2009 to make its own games, but following a longer-than-expected development cycle of Toki Tori 2 and poor sales, the development house was forced to close.

The new studio will now be working with a "much smaller team" on a new 2D side-scrolling shooter that will take advantage of the existing Toki Tori 2+ game engine.

"We’ve been making games for more than 13 years, so you can imagine how much it – quite frankly – sucks when after a four minute meeting at the courthouse, the company we built was no more. At the same time, we knew we were kinda stuck in the past and this was our chance to change things drastically," read a statement from the studio.

"In 2009 we started the transition from doing work for hire to becoming the Indie studio we had always wanted to be. We’re super proud of what we’ve achieved in recent years, but the company that resulted from that transition still held on to too many ideas and values from the old days. It’s difficult to make fundamental changes, but late October last year we had no other option. When Toki Tori 2 ended up taking way longer than expected and not achieving the sales we needed, it basically took the company down with it.

"There’s a lot to learn from what went wrong and what we could have done better and we’ll definitely write up a few blog-posts in the future on that! But now it’s time to move forward and look to the future."