SiN Episodes on hold

Ritual Entertainment co-founder Richard 'Levelord' Gray has confirmed that SiN Episodes: Emergence didn't sell well enough to fund the development of a second game, and that work on it has been postponed.

"The first episode did well, but not good enough to completely self-fund the second episode," Gray told official community site Ritualistic. "We did continue with Episode 2, but we had to stop a few months ago due to a funding problem."

He was speaking the aftermath of Ritual Entertainment's acquisition by casual games company Mumbo Jumbo, whose CEO, Mark Cottam, had been recently reported as saying that it didn't want the developer "involved at all in the action style games".

Still, Richard Gray remains positive that his once independent team will return to the series when it's established in the casual games sector.

"What we plan to do right now, both Ritual and MumboJumbo, is establish ourselves in the casual gaming market with strong new franchises and then return to SiN at a later date," he explained. "We love SiN, make no mistake, and we definitely want to return to it."

Ritual has so far released one episode of the new SiN series, via Steam, which met with decent reviews.

There's no final word on what to expect from the new breed of games from the developer, but Gray expects multiple titles before the end of the year.

"I'm not going to give any specific dates, but our plans are to finish more than a few games this year," he added. "Expect to see the Ritual logo on your PC, PS3, Wii, Xbox, console downloads... everywhere!"