Life is Strange: Double Exposure was released in October 2024, offering fans of the franchise another shot at Max Caulfield’s story after almost a decade. It saw Hannah Telle return to the role of the game’s protagonist, but this time around, she’d acquired an entirely new set of skills (read: magical powers).
Unfortunately, Double Exposure wasn’t the hit everyone was looking for and it ended up being a sales pitfall for Deck Nine Games. Sadly, the company underwent a second round of layoffs weeks after the game was released, with the company being stripped down due to ‘challenging times’.
At GDC, Double Exposure won an award for ‘Social Impact’, but as the story goes, nobody was there to collect because nobody was left.
What Now?
In December 2024, we covered the news that Deck Nine had made more layoffs – the second round in a 12-month window and the third in two years. It capped off a year of studio closures, redundancies, and cancellations, but it was far from being the last we’d see of these dire situations.
At the GDC Awards, Life is Strange: Double Exposure was recognised in the Social Impact category, but nobody from Deck Nine was there to collect the award. On social media, the narrative designer of Double Exposure, Elizabeth Ballou, explained that nobody even knew they’d been nominated.
It’s fitting that nobody was there to accept the GDCA award that Double Exposure won because we all got laid off, lol. A bunch of us are at GDC, but we didn’t know we were even nominated, so nobody was prepared to accept anything.
(Thanks to Kotaku for the quote)
It was later confirmed that the team was able to collect the award later in the day, but they weren’t there for that purpose.
I sat down with Hannah Telle, Double Exposure’s lead and the ten-year veteran voice behind Max Caulfield, to learn about the future of the series. The game ends with a nod to a follow-up title being in development, but the hope of that game surfacing are becoming slimmer all the time.
Did you enjoy Double Exposure? Are you surprised it didn’t sell well? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that Assassin’s Creed Shadows might have broken a credits record
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