Samson Developer Liquid Swords Goes Bankrupt Six Months After Launch, and the Studio Is Up for Sale

Swedish studio Liquid Swords, the developer and publisher behind the open-city crime game Samson, was declared bankrupt on October 12, about six months after the game reached Steam. Roughly 30 staff reportedly went unpaid for at least two months, and the receiver is selling the studio and its assets, with written bids due by noon CEST on October 21 (PC Gamer, God is a Geek).

What happened

The Stockholm District Court issued the bankruptcy order on October 12, first reported by the Swedish outlet Breakit. The petition came from the studio's own employees, who had not been paid for at least two months; Kotaku says wages had stopped in August. Unpaid wages will be covered by Sweden's state wage guarantee. Staff counts differ slightly between outlets, from about 30 to 27 employees being dismissed.

The receiver is Karl Björlin of the law firm Cirio. The receiver prefers to sell the business as a whole rather than in pieces, and founder Christofer Sundberg was named as a possible candidate. No buyer had been made public by the bid deadline.

What is for sale

Liquid Swords sale	Details
Bid deadline	12:00 CEST, October 21, 2026
Offers accepted for	The whole company or selected assets
Main assets	Samson source code, development tools, art, audio, design and narrative material; the Liquid Swords trademark
Samson sales (to Oct 14)	151,900 copies
Samson revenue (to Oct 14)	SEK 24.1 million (about $2.4 million)

The sales figures come from the receiver's bidding document, as reported by GameDev.net. In the meantime, the estate says it aims to "maintain continuity of the Company's operations relating to Samson, including ongoing support, patches and commercial activity." A buyer would still need its own agreements with Sony, Microsoft, Valve and Epic to keep the game on sale and updated on each store.

The studio and the game

Sundberg founded Liquid Swords in 2020 after co-founding Avalanche Studios, where he was creative director on the Just Cause series, which gave the new studio unusual attention for a debut. Samson: A Tyndalston Story is an open-city crime game with a run-based structure in which the player is a getaway driver repaying a debt to the mob.

It launched on Steam and the Epic Games Store on April 8, 2026 to mixed reviews, most aimed at bugs and performance, with a Metacritic score of 51. Sundberg publicly apologised on Steam, calling the launch state "unacceptable." The game reached PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles on September 21, and a Steam update followed on October 8, four days before the bankruptcy order.

Funding trouble had been visible for some time. PC Gamer reports that the game was first planned as a much larger action RPG, that one publisher rejected the studio five times, and that layoffs hit half the team in February 2025, after which the design changed significantly. Sundberg has since said he still plans to start a new studio with a more sustainable business model (Tech Insider).

Why it matters

The collapse shows how hard it is to fund a mid-sized open-world game from a standing start. A high-profile founder and a recognisable genre were not enough when the studio relied on outside money that, by PC Gamer's account, was repeatedly hard to secure. About $2.4 million of revenue in six months is modest for a studio of around 30 people that had been in development since 2020.

What to watch next

An announcement from the receiver on whether a buyer emerged and whether the business sells whole, and whether patches for Samson continue on Steam and consoles.

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