Windows game Galactic Reign being shut down

It's not clear what's going on at beleaguered Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City and SOCOM developer Slant Six games, but things do not look good.

Following a round of suspicious "temporary" layoffs in April comes news that its Windows Store game Galactic Reign - one of the better games there - will be removed from sale and have its servers closed by the end of the year.

"Galactic Reign will be removed from the Windows store on August 15th and the servers will be shut down on December 31, 2013," posted Xbox Product Team staffer BarbarossaBlade on the Xbox forum (via XBLA specialist Lifelower).

"We continually explore new games and entertainment concepts. Galactic Reign was a great cloud-based video rendering game exploration that we are going to bring to a close."

This needn't mean Slant Six has closed, but glance at the studio's usually active Twitter and Facebook accounts and nothing has been posted on either since June.

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City seems to be where things went down hill for Slant Six. The game flopped and the 96-strong studio was cropped shortly after, then again with the "temporary" lay-offs - which were rumoured to include almost all staff and probably wouldn't result in many being rehired.

Lifelower, usually a reputable source, today tweeted, "I heard the studio has laid off all staff & closed the doors." Lifeflower clarified the sources of this information as another Vancouver-based game studio called Firebase Industries, which tweeted on 13th June - the same day most social media activity stopped - "Sad to hear that Slant 6 closed their doors".

I've contacted the studio and if anything comes back I'll let you know.