The former co-developer of one of the most popular mobile games ever is closing

Kiloo Games, who jointly made one of the most popular mobile games ever in Subway Surfers, is set to close down and terminate all its staff before July.

As first reported by Game Developer earlier today on June 15, the Danish-based developer will be closing its doors for good next month in July. Before then however, the developer will be terminating every single one of its 100-person staff by the end of this month in June.

"I’m grateful for all the great people I’ve met along the way, either internally or in collaborations with other studios," writes design director Thomas Frøhlich on LinkedIn. Thank you to all my colleagues for the experiences we have shared. [...] Thank you to all the players that enjoyed our games, [and] thank you to Kiloo for all the learnings."

You might not necessarily have heard of Kiloo Games before today, but chances are you will have heard of their most popular game: Subway Surfers. The endless runner was first released on the iOS App Store back in 2012 as a partnership between Kiloo Games and SYBO Games, and by six years later in 2018, had amassed a staggering one billion total downloads.

However, Kiloo Games is no longer working on Subway Surfers at the time of the closure. SYBO Games, who co-developed Subway Surfers with Kiloo Games, has since taken full command of development going forward, so the closure of the latter studio won't have an impact on the mobile game.

Subway Surfers was announced in 2018 to be the first-ever game on the Google Play Store to cross one billion downloads. A year later in 2019, SYBO would announce that Subway Surfers was the most-downloaded mobile game of the decade, spanning from 2012 to 2019 (that's not how decades work, but the point stands that Subway Surfers was wildly popular).

After all that success, Kiloo Games is going away for good. It's hard not to look at the story of Kiloo as evidence of the unsustainable nature of video game studios and making games in general. If the co-maker of the most-downloaded mobile game ever can't stick around, who can?

Head over to our guide on the best mobile games if you're looking for something new to play on the go.