Liquid Swords, the Swedish studio behind the open-world action game Samson, has gone bankrupt. The Stockholm District Court declared the company bankrupt earlier this week (October 12th), and attorney Karl Björlin of the law firm Cirio was appointed as trustee. The studio was founded in 2020 by Christofer Sundberg, the co-founder of Avalanche Studios and creator of Just Cause, and Samson was its first and only release.
According to the trustee's sale documents, Liquid Swords has 27 employees, and all of them will be dismissed as part of the bankruptcy. It has been reported that the studio had not paid salaries for several months before the bankruptcy. Under Sweden's state wage guarantee, employees of a bankrupt company can have unpaid wages covered by the state, and the affected staff are now expected to be compensated that way.
The Trustee Is Looking For A Buyer
The bankruptcy estate has already put the business up for sale. In preliminary bidding documents dated October 15th, the trustee invited written bids for the company as a whole or for individual assets, with indicative bids due by noon on October 21st. The estate also says it will keep Samson running in the meantime, with the goal to "maintain continuity of the Company's operations relating to Samson, including ongoing support, patches and commercial activity."
Most of what is for sale is intellectual property. That includes the Samson source code, development tools, graphics, audio, design material, and narrative content, plus the Liquid Swords trademark and unregistered names like Criminal Justice and Tyndleston. Domains such as thesamson.com and the studio's social media accounts are on the list too, along with office equipment and servers. The Unreal Engine license from Epic Games is not part of the sale, so a buyer who wants to keep developing Samson would need its own deal with Epic, plus its own publisher status on each platform.
There is one big complication. NetEase, which has owned a minority stake in Liquid Swords since 2022, holds security over many of the Samson assets. Anyone who wants them free and clear will need to negotiate a release with NetEase or get its consent for the transfer. The studio's 2024 annual report, included with the sale documents, shows Liquid Swords also drew on a credit facility from NetEase that was part of the original investment deal.
How Samson Actually Sold
The sale documents include a full sales report, which gives a rare look at how a studio's debut game performed. As of October 14th, Samson had sold about 151,900 copies across all platforms for roughly SEK 24.1 million in net revenue. Steam accounts for 83,990 of those copies since the PC launch back in April (April 8th). The console versions did surprisingly well in a short time, with 54,380 copies sold on PlayStation and 13,530 on Xbox since they launched last month (September 21st).
Player reception split along platform lines too. Steam reviews currently sit at Mixed, with 2,001 of 3,597 reviews positive. The console versions, which arrived after months of fixes, average close to 4 out of 5 from users on both PlayStation and Xbox. Liquid Swords was still supporting the game until the end, releasing an update focused on combat responsiveness earlier this month (October 8th). Here is the console release date trailer the studio put out ahead of that launch:
Samson, also called Samson: A Tyndalston Story, follows a man who returns to the brutal city of Tyndalston owing dangerous people more than he can pay, while they use his sister as leverage. The game mixes close-quarters brawling with weaponized driving, and it is built around a daily debt quota that grows if you miss it, along with an action point system that forces you to commit to the missions you take. It sells for $24.99 on Steam.
A Long Road For Liquid Swords
The annual report shows how expensive that road was. Liquid Swords had no revenue in 2024 while it was still in development, and it posted a loss of about SEK 39.3 million that year after a loss of about SEK 35.2 million in 2023. The studio averaged 86 employees in 2024, far more than the 27 left today. In February 2025, as the studio went through a painful round of cuts, Sundberg wrote on LinkedIn, "A pitch dark day for Liquid Swords, but we will rise again and tomorrow will be the start of something new."
At the time, the board believed the company could keep going as long as its plans with publishers and partners worked out. The studio ended up self-publishing Samson instead. Neither Liquid Swords nor Sundberg has posted a public statement about the bankruptcy so far, and the studio's last posts on X were about the October update and a money-making guide for the game.
Sundberg co-founded Avalanche Studios in 2003 and led the creative side of the Just Cause series before leaving to start Liquid Swords. Plenty of fans were curious to see what he would do with a smaller team and a grittier city.
Do you hope a new owner picks up Samson and keeps supporting it, or do you think the game is better left as a one-and-done experiment?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.