The developer behind Saints Row, Descent, Red Faction, and more is shuttering.

I wonder if the last Saints Row had anything to do with this or if this had anything to do with the last Saints Row.

My guess is "both": general mismanagement, pressure to release games before they were ready, demands for game dev on a scale beyond what was possible for the time and staff they had ("GTA V does this; why can't we?"), and similarly unrealistic expectations for sales.

It's a drag because I really enjoyed Agents of Mayhem and the Saints Row reboot, but they were both pulled out of the oven way too early. Agents of Mayhem didn't have the content to justify being an open world game, and Saints Row, which I dug way more than most, was awfully buggy, to the point that it was all-hands-on-deck for bug fixes for ages with content updates suffering as a result.

Man I loved Red Faction back in the day. Didn't hold up as well in the remastered (excuse me, Re-Marstered ) edition, but it was way ahead of its time.
Saints Row 3 was a fantastic game. SR4 maybe was a little too silly and over the top. And like I've said, Saints Row (2022) was just not very good and not really finished. It's a shame if that's the game that took down the studio, but a full priced game has to be, not perfect, but at least not buggy. That game was a mess and really not up to current open-world games -- it really felt like a relic from 10 years earlier, while still being fun in short spurts.

Shame, Saints Row 2 was great and while the series was all downhill from there, people still loved their games.

I actually really enjoyed Saints Row 3. SR4 was a step down (it felt more like an expansion pack than a new game) but still enjoyable. Never played Agents of Mayhem. All in all, it sucks that one poorly received reboot was enough to kill the company.

I don’t think they were axed purely because of the reboot underperforming, but I’m sure it didn’t help.

Volition was under the corporate umbrella of Embracer, which went on a borderline-psychotic feeding frenzy during the pandemic when money was cheap, acquiring pretty much anything and everything: mostly game devs but even Dark Horse Comics and the Lord of the Rings IP (!). But they clearly overextended themselves, a $2 billion deal with the Saudis fell through, their stock took a catastrophic nosedive, and they’re shuttering studios (not just Volition) and in the middle of layoffs. Gearbox, which Volition was recently moved under, is undergoing a round of layoffs too.

And the disappointment so many people felt with the Saints Row reboot reportedly wasn’t entirely on Volition. Supposedly they wanted to make effectively Saints Row 2.5, but Deep Silver insisted that there wasn’t a market for that anymore, mandating instead that friendship and all that would be core to the reboot instead. (Word is that teal being a signifying color rather than purple was also a Deep Silver mandate.)

It’s a drag because I did love Volition, and I enjoyed Agents of Mayhem and the Saints Row reboot more than most.

I never played the reboot (didn't look bad to me), but Saints Row 2.5 sounds like it would have been the sweet spot for most fans of the franchise.