Well, here we go again. You know my spiel I normally do when I write a thing I do not want to write, but end up doing because nobody else will and people caught up are without what they paid for.

Prior recent SLG articles here and here. That’s a good catchup. Since the last one I made, they did start refunding people who got ghosted, but a bunch of status updates since then have fallen through, and as of today, Rayz Arcade Chronology has been pushed back to September, rather than the estimated June/July (PS4/Switch) given in the update email two months ago.

Their two active PR people (Dave and Nick) posted on Reddit a bit more to help out people who had refund issues, but continued to dodge inquiries into what “industry slowdowns” took place to impact their company production, or why it’s been since March 2023 for the last manufactured Switch cartridge they put out. We’re now fourteen months past the last standard edition video game made for the Strictly Limited branding shipped out. With more delays, (including a silent one of Akai Ito HD being bumped all the way to 2025, not emailed to any buyers!) it really doesn’t look that good for anything currently on preorder to come out from this company. They have posted status updates on the Dariusburst CE items coming in over the past few weeks, but still no sign of the standard edition game; that’s currently slated for July, so we’ll see if that one sticks.

And well, I could just end it at that and say “Yeah they’re dodgy and delay stuff but at least you can still get refunds fine”, but quite frankly, with this extra delay along with some other info tipped to me and dug up after poking around, I’m a bit more convinced than ever that these guys are just well… Not that financially stable and very likely to continue going downhill.

To start, per the title of the article, it has come about due to Linkedin updates that one of the two cofounders of Strictly Limited Games, Benedict, quit the company around March of 2024. I was given a hint about this thanks to JCTrenton on Reddit noticing that one of the two founders left the company, and doing some digging myself, I learned it was Benedict.

Considering how he was one of the two always, always part of the signatures left on emails announcing new releases or super major updates, to me this is very, very telling; it is unusual for heads of companies such as these to leave unless they find better opportunity elsewhere or something else happens, and this just seems like a bit of a sudden departure.

The last time I noticed something like this, was with Taiki from Dispatch Games, who left a good bit before everything collapsed with Brian, and now that cofounder has been working at City Connection on their recent retro ports for a long while now. Basically, leaving when stuff looks bad/unstable for job security. And honestly, being this is in my “discoveries” category and all, which is meant for quick news bites, I could end this here and have that be the last bit, being a “yo one of the two founders left, SLG may or may not make it but it seems he wouldn’t leave a company he founded without reason” situation.

Well, I dug deeper, and one of my limprint sources pointed me to a place that might give insight into what the so-called “Industry Slowdowns” SLG keeps repeating in their social media and customer service replies entail. This is more on the speculative side, but with it matching up with other observations I noticed, I have a small bit of confidence that this may reveal what is causing a bunch of SLG’s current troubles, and match up with earlier theories presented.

Lemme introduce you to Kununu. Heard of it? Probably not unless you’re German. It’s basically the German version of Glassdoor, a site for employees to post about their company under Anonymity to let others know if they should or should not work for them. Glassdoor stuff can usually be written by anyone and thus I don’t tend to personally take it into account when looking into a company (especially if it barely has any reviews on the site to begin with), but Kununu is a lot more niche, and with that in mind and a lot of similar habits I noticed on reviews left there, it matches up rather well with the current thoughts/worry about United Games’ (Strictly Limited’s parent company) financing.

Of course being that these are anonymous reviews, don’t take them as absolute certain evidence; especially if SLG has the means to disprove these worries and clear things up. (Which judging by their constant dodging of requests toward the matter, I’m pretty sure they can’t, at least from my view, but maybe this will force some transparency outta them)

The most recent of which from March, stood out to me quite a bit, and led to me pinning it here so you can all see. It’s even already in english! (I autotranslated the category of the ratings, but the review text was already in english to begin with)

Here we have something that matches the common worry about Strictly Limited: Lack of financing, thought to be due to games that just didn’t sell out or sell well at all. The Egret II is still one that comes to my mind as a product that was heavily promoted, very expensive to license, yet barely sold anything to speak of at all. A lot of their more recent games that weren’t shmups, are still in stock with tons of % left, and even with them attempting to massively discount it on amazon and the like, none of it is really moving all that much.

We also have a good idea from this what the “industry slowdowns” SLG’s brand manager referenced seems to mean, as in this review it also notes that a bunch of people got laid off a while ago. Being that last year was known as a year for layoffs, I can see United Games possibly pulling that as a means to cut costs, thus leading to less people to work on stuff and thus crunch everything into an even bigger mess; if this is what ultimately started the 14 month gap between standard editions, I wouldn’t be surprised honestly.

Looking further down the list of the reviews, I noticed a bunch of the other ones (primarily written in german) seemed to indicate similar when autotranslated. However, I’m not gonna show those in full since I do not trust machine translation enough to be concrete on the details, but you can see it for yourself in the kununu link above; a lot of complaints about stuff not doing well, lots of turnover, low profitability, etc. This would match with what we can see for ourselves on the website for certain SLG games that just refuse to sell out, or the amazon sales that discount stuff like Taito Milestones to $10 seemingly at random. When you’re discounting games that heavily, yeah, it’s gonna be because you need some cash flow badly.

But… Why not tell your buyers? Why not publicly tell people “hey we’re struggling in this industry and lost a lot of staff but we’re doing our best?” Why keep kicking the can down the road with endless discounts, acting like everything is fine, ghosting customers on ETAs, and delaying everything possible with zero indication on if anything will pick back up and if the stuff people preordered will even ship out at all?

Honestly? I don’t know. The easy answer is “they’re scared of refunds bankrupting them”, but if that’s the case, why give people false hope at all? Strictly is now in the same hole First Press Games and Dispatch dug with running out of money due to getting too ambitious, and while yes, they do ship in-stock stuff fast just fine, who’s to say a miracle burst of funding will save everything? Let’s say Dariusburst does make it out the door; will it fully sell out after all this time? Will people just be sick of it and ignore the game? Did people already buy it off the eShop to play it years ago? Will it even inspire people to preorder the next thing, or wait for that to be in-hand, too?

Quite bluntly, I’m pretty confident in saying that everything here indicates Strictly Limited/United Games is in trouble. The co-founder left quietly for a clearly more stable job, they’ve delayed more games stealthily and only announce delays on a wider scale when people basically pressure them into doing so, their public facing brand managers dodge questions about the status of the company’s health or the lack of ETAs, (and considering the kununu review indicates they had massive layoffs last year, that doesn’t look good either!) and the only thing that seems to remotely keep them afloat at the moment are the retail releases they do manage to pull off: the Turrican Japanese releases recently announced, the ININ special editions for Rainbow Cotton shipping in Japan this month, and the recent Japanese IREM Collection Volume 1 CE. (albeit still in a shameful, buggy state, which probably is why the other four haven’t shown up…)

Will they do a turnaround, get everything on the road and ship everything properly? Maybe, and I hope so since they do have some fun obscure retro gems I’d love to get, such as Over Horizon. Still, it doesn’t excuse the 14 month gap in standard edition releases, nor will it ever even if everything magically got fixed tomorrow.

But quite bluntly, you can only act like everything’s fine in front of a burning building before the flames pour out and start covering the entire street; it’s time for someone to either put the flames out and right the ship, or just come clean and explain what’s really going on here. The last thing we need, is a situation where the heads at United Games end up running out of money and going into the night ala Dispatch before them.