Recently news broke about the closure of Human Head Studios and how its founders and employees were acquired by Bethesda to form Roundhouse Studios. Apparently the news caught Rune II's publishers (Human Head's last title) by surprise - and is now suing over post-release plans that are up in the air.

The publisher in question, Ragnarok, posted the following statement via the official site for Rune II.

As we’ve said before, we love this game and we at Ragnarok Game LLC will continue to support RUNE II. We’ve poured in two-and-a-half years worth of passion and work into this project. And after a successful launch on the Epic Games Store a few weeks ago, we have received so much feedback from this great community. Our plan is to update and develop future RUNE II content for months to come.

As mentioned previously, we had no warning that our long term partner and friends in this project would abandon it during its most crucial moment, leaving our team at Ragnarok Game LLC to shoulder both the development and publishing burden of launch all on its own.

Since Human Head’s sudden closure, announcement, and discovering the active concealment of their acquisition, we have repeatedly requested access to the final launch build source code and RUNE II game assets. This is so we can continue to support, update, and execute future DLC for our community. As part of the publishing agreement on RUNE II, Ragnarok Game LLC has paid for the development of these assets and is the rightful owner of them. After repeated refusals by Human Head to produce these assets, we’ve had no choice but to file a legal complaint in order to obtain the RUNE II game assets. We have exhausted all possible options before getting to this point. This is not the step we wanted to take, but it is necessary in order to fulfill our promises to our community.

You can also read the legal filing here - which asks for a jury trial for Breach of Contract, Fraudulent Concealment, Conversion, Fraudulent Misrepresentation, Negligent Representation, and Unfair Business Practices. Yikes.

The summary is quite incendiary too.

In summary: (a) Human Head entered into a long-term agreement with Ragnarok — the whole goal of which was to launch Rune II and to provide the necessary support for its commercial success, (b) Human Head accepted millions of dollars in payment, but failed to perform, (c) instead of curing its deficient work, Human Head secretly conspired to abandon Ragnarok and the Rune II community in an apparent attempt to defraud and harm Ragnarok and the game, and (d) Human Head timed the unveiling of its plan to cause maximum damage.

An interesting turn of events to be sure, and definitely surprising in that the publisher claims to have no knowledge of the studio closure.