If they're able to make another game post-bankruptcy, it needs to be more mainstream. With development costs that just keep going up, devs can't really survive off of these niche titles with limited appeal and little to no publisher support. As awesome as LKS is, it's not the type of game that a relatively no-name developer can be financially successful with.
They have the talent to make awesome games, so I think they'll need to apply that talent to something more widely appealing. If they can do that and build a more wide-spread reputation, THEN they can venture into the niche realm and at least have name recognition and hopefully publisher support to back them up.
But that's all assuming this bankruptcy will mainly be a restructuring rather than a dissolution. Who knows.
JordanElek
Agreed. To be fair, in LKS's case, it didn't help that XSeed/Marvelous aren't what exactly what one would call big name publishers who could give LKS a better chance commercially, but given the nature of the actual game itself, I doubt even Nintendo could have transformed the game into a platinum-seller. What Little King's Story lacked, despite its critical praise, was an identity for its potential consumers to relate to, therefore many were unsure exactly who the game was trying to reach out to. That said, I do think that under a publisher like Nintendo, I think CING could be given the direction it needs to properly construct a game that has more mainstream appeal, which keeping many of its core qualities intact. If it doesn't find that publisher, however, it will have to at least look at one for inspiration to discover what it can do to get its products in the hands of more people in a manner that isn't too taxing financially.
That said, I'm still concerned about one particular part of this story. CING had numerous projects that were published by Nintendo, yet, it's still facing a situation like filing for bankruptcy. One would think that it got some sort of financial cushion for those projects because they were backed by such a major publisher, not to mention that the games themselves should have received at least a bit of a boost from a marketing side of things. If I'm correct here, then I would find it difficult to believe that a game like LKS would be enough to put CING in such a dire state, the company would go under instantaneously. Maybe I'm thinking too much into this side of the situation, though. It should be interesting to see where things head from here, that's for sure.
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