While we hear hopelessly of game studio closings these days, I don't think I've ever heard of a studio owner blaming the company's closure on leaked information that has not yet been made public. That is what happened today when all the employees of Possibility Space, a relatively young studio that has yet to release its first game to the public, were abruptly laid off.

According to the studio's former senior environmental artist, the employees received the news of Possibility Space's closure today "in a lovely morning surprise email."

The email was obtained by Polygon reporter Nicole Carpenter. In the note, Jeff Strain, owner of Possibility Space, who was a co-founder of ArenaNet and Undead Labs, recently received word from Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach that he and his wife Annie Delisi Strain He told studio staff that he was asked about the closure of Crop Circle Games, another studio he owned with his wife, Annie Delisi Strain, in a company called Prytania Media.

Gach's questions included "non-public information" about the first Possibility Space game and confidential business information about Prytania Media, including the identities of its publishing partners, Jeff Strain said in an email. Jeff said he was shocked to learn that the information came from a current employee. He claimed that after disclosing the leaked information to his publishing partner, the company "expressed a lack of confidence in investing the additional resources necessary to complete the game." Jeff and the unnamed publishing partner then "mutually agreed to cancel" the project.

The letter announced that Possibility Space would be shut down immediately and concluded with a note that Jeff was "leaving the gaming industry" to focus on his family and caring for his wife, who had recently disclosed a serious medical diagnosis.

Annie Delisi Strain disclosed that diagnosis last week in an open letter (archived here) regarding the closure of Crop Circle Games. In that letter, she also mentioned Gach's forthcoming Kotaku article. Annie expressed concern that Gach's coverage might reveal details about her medical records, and that Crop Circle's closure was due to "permanent and sustained change and contraction" in the gaming industry and a lack of investor interest in Crop Circle Games, which she described as " fundamentally out of step with the tastes of emerging players."

Jess Brunelle, former studio director at Crop Circle, refuted that justification in a post on LinkedIn after the closing." She wrote, "I think this is a very reductive statement and shifts the blame to everyone but the people at the top. To say that our game "was not commercially viable" sounds as if we didn't know what we were doing. There is no evidence to support this claim and we will never know if it was a commercially viable product."

In a brief response to the letter, Gaci stated that she did not intend to disclose Annie's medical diagnosis. He wrote: "I don't know how she came to that conclusion, and I regret that she did."

Although Gáti has not yet released a report on the closure of Crop Circle, former employees have publicly complained about the circumstances surrounding the studio's closure. According to one former employee's post on LinkedIn, they were fired without severance pay, while another described the studio's closing as messy and disrespectful.

In the wake of the studio closure, Strains has previously been accused of hypocrisy for expressing solidarity with workers and making statements criticizing the poor employee treatment of major developers. Austin Walker, former IP director at Possibility Space, re-shared a screenshot that Annie Strain posted on social media, blaming the gaming industry layoffs on "bad management and bad decision-making." In an open letter in 2021, Jeff Strain called for the formation of a gaming workers' union.

It is not particularly unusual for workers to speak anonymously to reporters about their workplaces, and I don't recall ever hearing of an investor immediately pulling out of a multi-year project because of an unpublished leak about the studio's games or finances. Today's letter from Jeff Strain does not explicitly state that the leak was the reason he and the publisher chose to cancel the game, but it does not state any other reason.

We don't know how far along the game was, but the studio had been in existence for several years; Possibility Space was founded in 2021 and includes former Campo Santo and Valve artist Jane Ng, former Ubisoft and Insomniac designer Liz England, and Richard Foge, who worked on the original God of War, Guild Wars 2, and State of Decay, were among the team of industry luminaries. [Besides the now-shuttered Possibility Space and Crop Circle Games, Jeff and Annie Prytania Media own two game development companies: Fang and Claw, "a people-first studio that makes player-centric AAA games, Dawon is a "mobile-first video game studio" based in Bengaluru, India. What Jeff Strain's statement that he is "stepping down" from the industry means for these studios is currently unclear.

Prytania Media's website has been shut down, as have the official websites of Possibility Space and Crop Circle Games.

We have reached out to Prytania Media for comment, as well as Kotaku's publisher, G/O Media.