A couple of days ago, we told you of the demise of Stainless Steel Studios, the rts-developing company of Age of Empires co-creator Rick Goodman. They were almost done with their newest real-time strategy game Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War.

Now Rick sort of blames Midway in a comment at Gamestar (German site, babelfish to the rescue). He says that Midway, as a publisher of Rise & Fall, cut off payment to Stainless Steel too soon. It appears that Stainless Steel were supposed to be polishing the game for a time but didn't receive the financial resources to keep doing so. Rise & Fall was delayed from a release in October this year to early 2006 because Midway suspected it would suffer in sales against established behemoths like Age of Empires III and Civilization IV.

Midway will release a statement of their own at the end of this week regarding the future of Rise & Fall and how things got messed up with SSSi. As of now, the center of the discussion of who gets the blame is to be found in this thread at the R&FHeaven-forums.

In other news: