Vancouver-based United Front Games, the studio behind cult Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 open-world title Sleeping Dogs, has shut down, according to multiple unconfirmed reports.
News that the studio had shut down started filtering out last night. United Front Games has not responded to comment requests from multiple publications, including Polygon and Kotaku.
Adding fuel to the fire, the studio’s most recent title, Smash + Grab, has since been pulled from Valve’s e-commerce store and is no longer available to purchase. The title hit Steam Early Access this past September. It was put on sale just this past weekend.
United Front Games was founded in 2007 by developers from a number of local studios, including Rockstar Games, Electronic Arts and Radical Entertainment. It’s most famous effort, the aforementioned Sleeping Dogs, was a critical success but did not meet the sales expectations of Square Enix.
If United Front Games has in fact closed, it will be a big hit to a Vancouver game development community that had just started to recover in recent years after a number of high-profile studio closures.
[via]Polygon[/via]
