United Front Games, the team behind the amazing open-world title Sleeping Dogs, is closing down. While this started as a rumour, one of Sleeping Dogs’ producers has confirmed it. United Front Games is no more.
Currently mourning the best job I've ever had, and the most wonderful team I've ever worked with.
The end of a great era.
Goodbye, UFG.— Jen Timms (@Scarlettjen) October 18, 2016
And to be honest, this does not really surprise us. After Sleeping Dogs, the team was appointed with a F2P version of a game set in the universe of Sleeping Dogs.
Triad Wars was a free-to-play expansion of Sleeping Dogs that never left its closed beta phase.
According to Justin Bullard, producer of Triad Wars, the development studio decided to create this game because it wanted to expand on its universe and offer something to all of its fans.
Triad Wars was meant to be released in 2016, however it was cancelled in January 20th.
United Front Games then started working on a MOBA game called SMASH+GRAB. SMASH+GRAB was described as an underground competition where gangs of the future battle it out for loot, weapons, and infamy inside a corporate urban dystopia.
This game was recently launched on Steam via its Early Access program, however it’s no longer available.
And that’s the end of United Front Games!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Wow, this is actually depressing. To me, UFG was a little gem of a studio that put out a surprising epic of a game in Sleeping Dogs. They could’ve done a sequel to that game and maybe grown into another massive studio like Ubisoft or Bioware. What a damn shame.
So SMASH+GRAB won’t be ever released? I won’t miss it at all. It was boring, bland and the weapons felt too weak. Instead of making the gameplay visceral, the devs followed millions of other games in which weapons have no weight to them and emit some cliche magical effects (freezing/flaming bats? Hackneyed and illogical).
Sad a very talented team :I
Not at the top, whether it was the studio, or more likely, their publisher, they obviously made a decision to jump on the multi-player bandwagon.
Setting a different genre, in the same universe rarely works.
The genre is as important as the setting, they should have stuck to making the sequel, their fan base liked the genre, as much, if not more, than the universe.
That they failed, like most such attempts, is no big surprise.
Meh
Sleeping dogs was an under rated game, Picked it up on steam sale and wasn’t expecting much for such a cheap price.
Turned out to be one of the best games I played that year, Shame to see a good team break up.
Best of luck to them all in future endeavours.
Very good team i enjoyed sleeping dogs and i wanted a squeal guess that won’t happen.
The Sleeping Dogs IP is owned by square enix not United Front Games so there’s still a chance
Wonder why it had poor sales must be over marketing.
Why this crackhead dev hesitant to work on sleeping dogs 2 is beyond me….
Because the IP belongs to Square Enix and SD1 was not profitable enough for them to justify a follow up. They greenlit that F2P game instead to gain some market interest into the IP but over time that proofed to be a failure.
Thats the worst decision ever made..entering already crowded market to gain attention…smh
Really sad this happened. Sleeping Dogs still is by far one of my favorite open world games.
They don’t have the IP rights to sleeping dogs.
I know. I’m just hoping they get together again and make a Sleeping Dogs game if the opportunity permits.
Best of luck to them. :s
Man! That really sucks. Sleeping Dogs felt like a set-up for the beginning of a series just like Yakuza.
Bad news, Now Smash+Grab will be forever stuck in Early Access….
They should have made SLEEPING DOGS 2 instead of that garbage pay2win version of it
with what money? they made the f2p game because sleeping doggies did not sell.
It did sell, Sleeping Dogs sold more than a million and a half copies on Steam (not counting all the DLC), and the Definitive Edition just shy of 500k units.
The problem is that they spent that sweet dough developing that f2p Sleeping Dogs canceled abortion and then in that horrible MOBA game.
I hope gaming media cover the reason why this happened to UFG so more developers see spending money on F2p garbage CAN make you go bankrupt.
The ‘gaming media’ doesn’t cover crap except when they run out of paid articles and reviews.
Well, that’s what they get getting on the “let’s make our game into an online game” bandwagon. Sleeping Dogs was pretty good
Remember when Sleeping Dogs was originally a True Crime game that Activision cancelled? Glad their best work got to see the light of day. Sad to see them go, my best to each and every talented member on the team.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ce2ed9cdf688fca629bd2ec2c885359fe082514828d195111aae743eb013812c.gif
“Triad Wars was a free-to-play expansion of Sleeping Dogs that never left its closed beta phase.”
Lol, why?
I liked the idea of sleeping dogs, not the actual story of the game or the gameplay, the story was meh, i couldnt care any less, the shooting and fighting was meh and driving was average.
Also their dlc practices were god awful.
Still a open world set in Hong Kong.
they had the potential, just didn’t have the direction
dats wat you get for making triad wars.
I liked Sleeping Dogs more then watch dogs and gta… Really amazing game