Liquid Swords, Developer of GTA-Like Samson, Goes Bankrupt With Nearly 30 Unpaid Staff and a Sale Deadline of October 21

By CriticalPixel · 2026-10-17

Liquid Swords, the Stockholm studio that shipped the GTA-like Samson in April, has been declared bankrupt, and the whole business is now up for sale with a bidding deadline of October 21. The Stockholm District Court issued the order on October 12, according to a notice from the administrator at the Cirio law firm, and the news reached English-language outlets today through Kotaku. Close to 30 developers are affected, and the reporting says none of them had been paid since August. That is the part that should bother you more than any Metacritic number. A team kept patching a broken launch for months while working without salary, and the reward was a court order. The studio's only game, its IP and its staff are now line items in a sale.

Screenshot from Samson, the open world action game by Liquid Swords, from its Steam store page

What the court order actually says

Liquid Swords was founded in 2020 by Christofer Sundberg, the Avalanche Studios co-founder who oversaw all four Just Cause games during his time there. Samson was the company's first and only title, and it doubled as both developer and publisher, which means there was no outside publisher to absorb the hit when sales and reviews went sideways. Karl Björlin of Cirio was appointed administrator when the order came down, and the estate's assets are described as mainly the intellectual property tied to Samson. The administrator's own notice, published in Swedish, lists the team's backgrounds at DICE, Rockstar, Starbreeze and Avalanche Studios, and calls the game an action title with strong visual identity and clear market potential. That is sales language, and it makes sense: the point of the notice is to find a buyer. Gametalk, which reported the order with Breakit as its source, adds that the state wage guarantee now steps in to cover the staff's unpaid salaries, and that employees had themselves petitioned for the bankruptcy after going two months without pay.

A rough launch the studio never recovered from

Samson hit Steam on April 8, 2026 and was met with less-than-stellar reviews. Kotaku reports it sits at 51 percent on Metacritic, with critics and players pointing at a litany of bugs and performance problems at launch. Sundberg himself wrote an apology letter on Steam calling the state of the game at launch unacceptable and promising fixes for the game-breaking bugs. The Steam page currently shows Mixed user reviews, so the patches clearly helped without turning the story around. To the studio's credit, Samson kept receiving updates, with a Steam update on October 8 and a release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles on September 21. Shipping a console port and a patch while the paychecks had stopped says something about the people on that team, and nothing flattering about the situation they were working in.

Second Samson screenshot showing the game's urban setting, from the official Steam store page

What happens to Samson now

The sale is on a tight clock. Indicative bids have to be submitted in writing by 12:00 on October 21, 2026, and the administrator has put the business and its assets on the table together, Samson included. Gametalk says, citing Breakit, that the administrator is hopeful of finding a buyer. Kotaku notes that we should have a clearer idea of the game's future once the bidding window closes. Until then nobody can say whether Samson keeps getting patches, whether servers or storefront listings stay up, or whether the IP gets shelved by whoever picks it up. As of the Kotaku report, neither Liquid Swords nor Sundberg has addressed the bankruptcy order on any of their social media accounts, so the public record is the court, the administrator and the press.

Community reaction is thin so far

Reaction on X is limited at this point. What showed up in a search today was mostly outlets and aggregators repeating the Breakit report in English, Arabic and German, rather than players arguing about it. One English post from DigitaleAnimeEN called it shocking news and asked whether Liquid Swords can find a buyer to revive the studio and its projects or whether this is the end of the road. That is a question, not a consensus, and with fewer than three independent reactions of substance it would be dishonest to claim the community has picked a side. What we can say is that the story is moving through the gaming press as a layoff and wages story as much as a failed launch story, which is the right way to read it.

The CriticalPixel take

Here is the uncomfortable read. Samson launched broken, the studio owned both the code and the storefront relationship, and it had no publisher cushion once the numbers disappointed. A rough launch should cost a studio its reputation for a while. It should not cost nearly 30 people two months of wages and then a seat in an insolvency auction. Self-publishing a GTA-flavored open world is a brave bet, and brave bets with no safety net end badly like this when the first month goes badly. That part is on the business plan, not on the developers who kept shipping updates for a game most of the internet had already written off. If you bought Samson on PC or console, the honest advice is to expect nothing and be pleasantly surprised if October 21 produces a buyer who wants the game maintained. If you are a developer in Sweden or anywhere else weighing a self-published debut, this is the case study to keep on your desk.

Third Samson screenshot from the official Steam store page

We will be watching October 21 for any word on a buyer, and for any statement from Sundberg, who has so far been silent. If the IP goes to someone with the budget to fix what launch broke, Samson might get a second life. If it does not, this becomes one more entry in a long list of studios that made a game, took a punch and could not afford the second round.