It’s been a hot minute since we last checked in with Bill Roper, a well-known industry veteran with titles such as Warcraft, Hellgate London, and Champions Online under his belt. In 2024, we learned that his new “AA games” studio Lunacy Games was working on a couple projects, including an apocalyptic Old West survival RPG and a sequel to Hellgate. But in a new post on LinkedIn, Roper is quite pessimistic on the state of the industry and the feasibility of making new titles in the current landscape.
“I’ve seen talented people lose jobs, award-winning studios get shut down, and have been unable to get any funding for our company,” Roper wrote. “All I want to do is make games, but that feels like a Sisyphusian effort. So much so that we’ve had to sell our house and my family is in the midst of traveling across the country, moving somewhere that we can afford to live while we start a new chapter in our lives. It’s not what I expected to happen and it took me a long time to realize it isn’t about me, at all. Our industry feels broken.”
Roper chides video game companies that lay off employees after seeing increases of profits, and he ends on an even more downbeat note: “I candidly don’t know if video games is done with me, or what the future holds.”
It’s unclear whether his studio and projects are continuing. Roper still lists himself as the current CEO of Lunacy Games.
