There is something genuinely bittersweet about the way Jake Solomon chose to say goodbye. On 19 February, the celebrated game designer posted a brief clip of Burbank to X, a pre-alpha look at the life sim his team had spent nearly two years building. It was the game's first public outing. It was also its last.
Solomon, best known for leading design on the modern XCOM series and directing Marvel's Midnight Suns at Firaxis, confirmed in the same post that his indie studio Midsummer was closing. As reported by Eurogamer, he offered no explanation for the closure, only a brief farewell:
"We built a studio, we made a game, and I'm really proud of both."
What the footage revealed was genuinely intriguing. Burbank was pitched as a kind of televisual sandbox, a game where you cast your own characters, assign them motivations and relationships, and then watch the drama unfold as though you were producing a small-town soap opera. Solomon described it as "Life Sims + The Truman Show", though he insisted the concept ran deeper than that tagline. According to reporting by Rock Paper Shotgun, an earlier version of the project had drawn inspiration from sources as varied as Stephen King and Gilmore Girls, with a promise of endlessly evolving small-town scenarios.
The Eurogamer write-up captures what made Burbank distinct from a straightforward Sims clone. Players were not fully in control; the characters had their own logic and would surprise you. You set the parameters, chose a story outline, established motivations, and then stepped back. A 2024 Eurogamer feature on the studio's founding described the broader ambition as a life sim focused on the drama of modern life, one where players would write meaningful stories simply by playing.
The game's characters were to use AI for memory, reasoning, and speech, which Solomon acknowledged in a follow-up comment. He was careful to draw a line, though: all artwork was produced by the studio's human artists, and he stressed the team had no interest in replacing developers with AI. It is a distinction that matters in an industry where the use of generative AI remains deeply contested, particularly among voice performers and writers. Critics have pointed out that deploying AI for character dialogue and speech does still displace work that would otherwise go to human performers, regardless of how the distinction is framed.
A Long-Shot Bet in a Brutal Market
The global games industry has been enduring a prolonged contraction, and Midsummer's closure is part of a wider pattern. Earlier on the same day Solomon made his announcement, Sony confirmed it was shutting down Bluepoint Games, the studio behind the acclaimed Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus remakes. For a small indie outfit still in pre-alpha, the funding environment is far less forgiving.
Midsummer was founded in May 2024, with a team that included Firaxis veteran Will Miller, who had worked on Civilization: Beyond Earth and Midnight Suns, as well as Grant Rodiek, a longtime designer on the Sims franchise. According to Rock Paper Shotgun, the studio had around 12 staff listed on LinkedIn at the time of the announcement. The company had raised more than $6 million in seed funding from an array of backers: South Korean games publisher Krafton, TV and film company Day Zero Productions, and a collection of venture capital firms including Transcend Fund, Betaworks Ventures, and 1Up Ventures.
Six million dollars sounds substantial, but game development timelines are unforgiving, and for an ambitious AI-integrated title aiming to challenge the dominance of EA's The Sims, it was always going to be tight. When Midsummer launched, Solomon told Game Developer that investors had been enthusiastic precisely because life sims had been underserved: "There were people who said, flat out, 'we've been waiting for somebody who seems equipped to do this.''" Whether the funding simply ran out, or whether the AI-heavy design approach created obstacles of its own, Solomon has not said.
Solomon's Track Record Deserves Respect Here
Look, it is easy to frame this as another indie studio that flew too close to the sun. But Solomon's credentials are real. After joining Firaxis in the late 1990s, he spent over two decades there, eventually leading the 2012 reboot of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a game that resurrected a dormant franchise and became a critical benchmark for the tactics genre. XCOM 2 followed, and then Marvel's Midnight Suns in 2022, a card-based tactical RPG that earned strong reviews but underperformed commercially. It was after Midnight Suns that Solomon left Firaxis to build something genuinely new.
The ambition behind Burbank was not small. Player-driven narrative, emergent character AI, episodic soap-opera structure: these are ideas that serious designers have been circling for years without cracking. The tragedy is that the pre-alpha footage, whatever its rough edges, suggests the team was building something with real personality. Whether that concept lives on, perhaps through a new studio or a different publisher arrangement, remains genuinely unclear. Solomon's announcement used present-tense language about the game that has left some observers wondering whether Burbank's story is truly over.
For now, a team of roughly a dozen people is out of work, and an interesting game idea has been shelved before it had a chance to prove itself. That is a real cost, and it deserves to be acknowledged plainly. The games industry's contraction is not just an abstract economic story; it is made up of moments exactly like this one.