A new and former IguanaBee employee spoke about the problems while making Skull Island: Rise of Kong.
There is no shortage of bad games, even in the current year. IPs of high-grossing franchises turned into a game and served with barely anything working has also become a norm in the gaming market. This year saw the emergency of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings spinoff game of Gollum, which was deemed to be the worst entry so far in 2023. Clunky gameplay, never-ending bugs and optionally working mechanics surely brought the game down to a questionable state.
Just the time people forgot about Gollum, a new contender appeared out of the blue, called Skull Island: Rise of Kong. This particular game would talk about the backstory of King Kong and it was supposed to be a thrilling adventure. Until people realized it was a trainwreck with 50 dollar price tag was slapped on top of it. Quickly people started posting on social media, exposing problems about Skull Island: Rise of Kong and telling others not to purchase the game.
Despite being a low-scoring game, people still wanted to know why Skull Island: Rise of Kong ended up being a failure. Today, an anonymous IguanaBee, the developer of the game, came forward and gave some implicit information about the title. As it turns out, the title was made in a year with an excessive amount of crunch included. IguanaBee is not a rookie or an inexperienced developer of sorts, but the crunch time, including the demands of the publisher, ended up destroying the working team entirely.
One of the previous developers in IguanaBee spoke negatively about the studio’s main publisher, GameMill. GameMill would have given instructions that were loose or inadequate for the developers at IguanaBee, leaving them in a limbo of confusion. So it’s mostly the fault of the publisher, giving extremely tight deadlines while giving no proper indications on how the game should be.
