The studio behind Burbank, a life sim designed to merge the depth of The Sims* with the narrative focus of Gilmore Girls, has quietly shut its doors. Jake Solomon, the former Firaxis creative director responsible for XCOM and Marvel’s Midnight Suns, announced the closure of Midsummer Studios in a brief post, accompanied by a two-minute gameplay trailer of the project—its first and only public showcase.
Solomon framed the reveal as a bittersweet farewell, emphasizing the studio’s pride in building both a team and a game. Burbank was positioned as a hybrid between life simulation and guided storytelling, where players could craft intricate narratives through emergent NPCs powered by generative AI. The trailer, though rough around the edges—featuring placeholder voice lines and pre-alpha visuals—hinted at a system where characters retain memory and reasoning, adapting dynamically to player actions.
Funding struggles appear to be the likely cause of the shutdown. Despite securing $6 million in initial investments, including backing from Krafton, Midsummer reportedly pursued additional funding rounds as late as November 2025, raising just $600,000—a sum critics suggest was insufficient to sustain development. The studio’s LinkedIn and other official channels had remained unusually quiet since its 2024 launch, with Solomon’s last public activity celebrating XCOM 2’s anniversary weeks before the closure announcement.
What Burbank promised—and why it might have failed
The project’s core innovation lay in its NPC generation system, which Solomon described in past interviews as a blend of Dwarf Fortress-style depth and guided narrative tools. Unlike open-ended sandbox sims, Burbank aimed to nudge players toward meaningful stories, with AI handling voice, memory, and even emotional responses. However, the reliance on generative AI for speech—while technically ambitious—has long been a contentious topic in gaming, with voice actors and developers questioning its ability to replace human performance in emergent narratives.
Industry observers note that Burbank’s hybrid approach could have appealed to players tired of either overly restrictive storytelling games or chaotic sandbox experiences. Yet, the lack of a clear publisher or marketing push, combined with the financial hurdles, may have doomed it before release. Solomon’s pivot from turn-based strategy to life sims—inspired by his desire to explore smaller, character-driven dramas—now stands as an unfinished experiment.
A studio’s end, but not the end of the dream
Reaction to the closure has been mixed, with some developers expressing disappointment over the loss of a potentially groundbreaking project, while others speculate that Burbank’s AI-driven design may have been ahead of its time—or simply too complex to execute at scale. Solomon’s legacy, however, remains intact: from Civilization to XCOM, his work has shaped modern strategy games, and Burbank* was meant to be his next act. Whether fragments of the project will resurface—or if Solomon will return to development—remains unclear. For now, the game industry has lost a bold experiment, and players are left wondering what might have been.
