There is a very specific, very modern kind of heartbreak that comes with watching a “goodbye” video from a developer you’ve followed for years. It’s not just about the loss of a potential game to play on a Friday night; it’s the abrupt closing of a window into a world we were promised but will never actually get to inhabit. This week, that familiar sting returned. Jake Solomon—the creative engine behind the modern XCOM resurgence and the surprisingly soulful Marvel’s Midnight Suns—announced that his independent venture, Midsummer Studios, has officially shuttered its doors. And just like that, a dream that felt so close suddenly vanished.
According to the Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed, the studio—which only stepped into the light in May 2024 with a burst of optimism—is calling it quits before its debut project, Burbank, could even reach a playable alpha for the public to test. To soften the blow, or perhaps to show us what might have been, Solomon shared some brief, flickering footage of the project on social media. He described it as a curious, ambitious mix of a life sim and The Truman Show. It was supposed to be a “narrative sandbox” where players weren’t just decorating kitchens or managing career tracks, but essentially directing their own television series where the characters had minds, memories, and agendas of their own. Or, at least, that was the grand vision they were chasing.
Honestly? It’s a tough pill to swallow for anyone who loves systems-driven games. Solomon is one of those rare designers who knows how to make complex systems sing in harmony. If anyone had the pedigree to disrupt the absolute stranglehold The Sims has had on the life-sim genre for decades, you’d have put your money on him and his team. But as we’ve seen with exhausting frequency in this volatile industry, a great reputation and a bold idea aren’t always enough to keep the lights on when the venture capital starts to dry up and the market turns cold.
Chasing a Ghost: What Burbank Was Actually Trying to Build
When Midsummer Studios first launched, they didn’t just talk about making a game; they talked about “revitalizing the life sim genre” entirely. Back in the early months of 2024, the pitch for Burbank sounded like something straight out of a creative writing workshop that had gone delightfully off the rails. You weren’t just clicking on a fridge to make sure your Sim didn’t starve. You were choosing overarching story themes—imagine something like “seducing the local hottie” or “uncovering a neighborhood secret”—and then watching an endlessly evolving simulation react to those whims in real-time. It was Gilmore Girls meets Stephen King, all filtered through the tactical, consequence-heavy lens of a mastermind who spent years perfecting the “permadeath” tension of XCOM.
The footage Solomon shared this week was undeniably rough—pure pre-alpha stuff—but even in those low-resolution clips, you could see the spark of something special. The “build-your-own-TV-series” DNA was right there on the surface. It felt personal, quirky, and deeply focused on character agency in a way most AAA games are too afraid to try. Solomon noted that the game allowed characters to “come alive in a way we’ve never experienced.” And look, when that comes from a guy who spent years making us genuinely cry over randomly generated soldiers dying in a muddy ditch in XCOM on PC and Xbox, that’s a statement that carries some real weight. He knows how to manufacture empathy through code, and seeing that potential cut short feels like a genuine loss for the medium.
But there was a catch—one that has become perhaps the most polarizing and heated topic in game development over the last two years. Burbank was leaning heavily, almost fundamentally, into generative AI. The characters were designed to use AI not just for flavor, but for memory, reasoning, and speech. In Solomon’s vision, this was the “secret sauce” that would allow players to drop any character into any story and have them react authentically. It wasn’t about replacing human artists with a button press; it was about creating a level of narrative reactivity that traditional, hand-written branching dialogue simply can’t touch. But in 2024, “AI” is a word that carries a lot of baggage, and it might have been a weight too heavy for the project to carry.
“We built a studio, we made a game, and I’m really proud of both… 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.”
Jake Solomon, Co-founder of Midsummer Studios
The High-Stakes Bet on Silicon Souls
I’ve spent a lot of time talking to developers lately about this “AI gold rush,” and the consensus is usually a messy mix of technical excitement and absolute existential dread. Solomon was quick to defend his team’s use of the tech, making it very clear that all the visual art was created by talented human beings and that the studio had “no interest in replacing any developers.” But when you start talking about AI-generated speech and reasoning, you’re inevitably stepping on the toes of writers and performers. It’s a sensitive area, and for good reason. If the game is generating its own dialogue on the fly to support a player’s weird, unpredictable narrative choices, where does the scripted heart of the game actually live?
It’s a fascinating technical challenge, but it’s also a marketing nightmare in the current climate. According to a 2023 GDC State of the Game Industry report, roughly 4 out of 5 developers expressed significant concerns about the ethical implications of Generative AI in the workplace. While Burbank aimed to use AI as a tool for emergent gameplay rather than a simple cost-cutting measure, the optics are always tricky to navigate. You’re trying to sell a dream of “infinite stories,” but many players hear “hollow stories.” Whether that’s fair or not is a debate that’s still raging, but for Midsummer, the debate might have happened before they could even prove their case.
Maybe that controversy was part of the problem. Or maybe, as is so often the case, it was just the cold, hard math of survival. Midsummer launched with $6 million in funding from heavy hitters like Krafton and various venture capital firms. In the world of indie development, $6 million sounds like a king’s ransom, doesn’t it? But for a studio of 12 people trying to build a cutting-edge, AI-integrated simulation for PC and high-end consoles, that money vanishes faster than you’d think. A 2024 report by Newzoo highlighted that the cost of “mid-tier” game development has skyrocketed recently, with many studios finding themselves in a “dead zone”—too big to be nimble enough for a garage-style indie hit, but too small to compete with the marketing budgets of giants like Electronic Arts.
The “Venture Capital Leopard Seal” Problem
I’ve heard venture capitalists described as “leopard seals in human skin suits,” and while that’s incredibly cynical, it captures the predatory nature of high-stakes investment perfectly. When you take $6 million from firms like Transcend Fund or 1Up Ventures, you aren’t just getting a gift to pursue your art; you’re getting a ticking clock. These firms aren’t looking for a “nice little game” that sells 500,000 copies and makes a modest profit for a decade. They are looking for the next Roblox or The Sims—a platform that can scale infinitely and generate recurring revenue until the sun burns out.
If Burbank was struggling to find its “fun” in the early stages, or if the AI integration was proving too expensive to maintain at scale, those leopard seals were always going to stop swimming. We’ve seen a massive, painful contraction in the industry lately. A 2025 survey from the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) noted that studio closures had reached a three-year high as venture capital interest pivoted sharply toward specialized AI infrastructure rather than the actual games being built with it. It’s a cruel irony, isn’t it? The very technology that made the vision for Burbank possible might have been the thing that distracted the investors from the game itself. They want the engine, not necessarily the car.
What We Actually Lose When the Lights Go Out
The tragedy here isn’t just that we won’t get to play Burbank this year. It’s that we’re losing another genuine attempt at doing something different in a genre that has felt stagnant for a long time. Right now, the life sim space is in a weird, fragmented spot. We have The Sims 4 continuing its decade-long reign through a mountain of DLC, InZOI pushing the boundaries of photorealism until our GPUs scream, and Paralives carrying the torch for the indie “cozy” crowd. But Solomon’s project was something else entirely—it was a systemic, narrative-heavy experiment from a guy who knows how to make mechanics feel like they have a soul.
I’m looking at the footage Solomon posted again, and I see a lot of heart in those pixels. There’s a warmth to the art style that completely belies the “AI-driven” backend. It didn’t look like a soulless tech demo; it looked like a game someone loved. And that’s the part that hurts the most. When Solomon says, “this game was a dream of mine,” you believe him. You don’t walk away from a stable, high-level gig at Firaxis—the legendary home of Civilization—unless you have a fire in your belly for something new. You don’t risk it all on a “narrative sandbox” unless you truly believe there’s a better way to tell stories in games.
So, what happens now? The 12 staff members at Midsummer are out of a job, and in this current market, that’s a terrifying place to be. We can only hope that the “Burbank” tech—or at least the philosophy of player-driven storytelling behind it—finds a home somewhere else. Solomon’s social media post used the present tense in a way that felt almost hopeful, as if the dream isn’t quite dead, just looking for a new place to sleep for a while. Maybe it’ll resurface in a few years under a different name, or maybe it’ll influence the next generation of designers who want to break the “Sims” mold.
Will Burbank ever be released?
As of right now, the answer is no. Midsummer Studios has officially closed its doors, and Burbank was only in a very early pre-alpha state. Unless another publisher or a deep-pocketed benefactor steps in to buy the assets and intellectual property, the game is effectively cancelled and will remain a “what if” of gaming history.
Who was funding Midsummer Studios?
The studio managed to raise $6 million from a high-profile group of investors. This included Krafton (the massive publishers behind PUBG and the upcoming InZOI), Day Zero Productions, and several venture capital firms like Transcend Fund and Betaworks Ventures. It was a serious roster of backers, which makes the closure even more shocking.
A Final Reflection on the “Narrative Sandbox”
The “narrative sandbox” has always been the holy grail of game design. It’s that perfect, shimmering middle ground where the player has total, chaotic freedom, but the world still feels like it has a coherent story to tell. We’ve seen glimpses of it in games like RimWorld or the labyrinthine complexity of Dwarf Fortress, but Burbank was trying to put a relatable, human face on it. It wanted to give us characters we could talk to, manipulate, and grow to love—all within the familiar framework of a TV show we were directing. It was an attempt to bridge the gap between “gameplay” and “story” in a way that felt seamless.
Maybe the tech just isn’t quite there yet. Or maybe the market for a “Life Sim + Truman Show” is smaller than the $6 million buy-in required to make it a reality. Whatever the reason, the closure of Midsummer Studios is a stark reminder that the gaming industry is currently a brutal gauntlet. Even the giants of the industry can stumble when they try to step off the beaten path. And while those “Wonkaverse” AI voices in the early trailer might have been a bit jarring to some, the ambition behind them was genuine and, frankly, refreshing.
Good luck to Jake Solomon and the rest of the Midsummer team. You swung for the fences, and in an industry increasingly dominated by safe bets, microtransactions, and endless sequels, that’s something worth being proud of. We’ll be waiting to see where you land next—and hopefully, the next dream lasts a little longer than this one did. We need more people willing to fail at big ideas than people content to succeed at small ones.
This article is sourced from various news outlets and social media statements. The analysis and presentation represent our editorial perspective on the current state of the indie development landscape.
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