Ex-Wolfpackers take on Stray Bullet

In March, an employee of Wolfpack Studios, Sean "Ashen Temper" Dahlberg, broke the news that parent company Ubisoft was shutting down the subsidiary. A rep from Ubi told GameSpot News the decision was made to "concentrate Ubisoft's development in its larger studios where more resources are available." The closing of Wolfpack, finalized earlier this week, meant that the future of the company's top title, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Shadowbane, was uncertain.

While gamers had wondered how they were going to keep their Shadowbane characters alive and well, Dahlberg wondered how he was going to pay the bills and put food on his table. Both questions were answered in a new post on Dahlberg's blog, which revealed that former Wolfpack members have formed a new studio, Stray Bullet Games, which has been contracted by Ubisoft to maintain Shadowbane.

"From the ashes of Wolfpack Studios, a new company has formed called Stray Bullet Games (SBG)," said Dahlberg. "Unlike Wolfpack, SBG is not a Ubisoft company. Instead it is a third-party development studio. This basically means the studio is, technically, answerable to itself."

According to Dahlberg, the new studio already has plenty of other projects in the works, but SBG will not be doing Shadowbane 2.

"The publishing and intellectual rights [to the Shadowbane franchise] are not owned by Stray Bullet Games and we will, more likely, make an original title."

Dahlberg expects more news and a new company Web site to be made public sometime soon.