Remedy and Tencent's co-op multiplayer game Kestrel has been cancelled

Remedy have called it quits on the project codenamed Kestrel. The co-op multiplayer game was an original IP being made with the backing of Tencent, but now Remedy say they've cancelled it to allow them to focus on "other games in our portfolio", all of which are based on "existing franchises".

"Codename Kestrel showed early promise, but the project was still in its early concept stage. Our other projects have advanced well and are moving to the next stages of development, and increasing focus on them provides us with benefit," says Remedy’s CEO Tero Virtala in the announcement. "We can reallocate talented Kestrel developers to these other game projects, and many of our support functions get additional focus on their operations. This is yet another means to ensure that our game projects continue advancing well."

Not much was known about Kestrel other than that it was a premium cooperative multiplayer game. It grew out of an early project, codenamed Vanguard, a free-to-play co-op game which reached proof-of-concept stage last year. At that point, Remedy and Tencent decided that Remedy were better off leaning more into their "core strengths", at which point Vanguard switched to a premium game and adopted the Kestrel project codename.

Now that Kestrel has been cancelled, developers are being re-deployed on new games in "existing franchises". One of those is Control 2, which was confirmed back in 2022, and one is a project codenamed Condor, which is a four-player co-op spin-off set in the Control universe first announced in 2021. Earlier this year, Remedy took total ownership over the Control IP.