Only a few short weeks after the creative driving sandbox Wreckreation rolled onto PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, the future of the studio behind it has been thrown into doubt. Three Fields Entertainment, founded by former Criterion developers whose names are tied to the high speed chaos of the Burnout series, has warned its entire team that they may soon be out of work.
The news arrived in an emotional public message from chief executive officer Fiona Sperry, who explained that after twelve years of building Three Fields as a small, fiercely independent studio, she has been forced to place every member of staff on notice of redundancy. 
For a team that has spent years trying to recapture the thrill of arcade style racing in a modern market, it is a devastating moment.
Wreckreation itself is an ambitious pitch. It mixes open world driving with a build as you go toolset, letting players reshape roads, ramps, and hazards in real time while they race. On paper it sounds like the natural evolution of the crash happy DNA that made Burnout famous. In practice, its launch in October was bumpy. Players reported technical issues, performance problems, and frustrating bugs that sometimes got in the way of its wild creativity.
Sperry does not simply point to that rocky launch as the villain of the story. Instead, she lays out a harsher financial reality. As an independent studio working with a publisher, Three Fields will not see revenue from sales of Wreckreation for the foreseeable future. Throughout much of the year, and for all of the post launch support so far, the company has been paying its own way. In other words, while players see the game on store shelves, the people who made it are still waiting for money to flow back.
Despite those constraints, the team has kept pushing. Since release they have been patching, balancing, and adding features requested by the community. Sperry describes a tiny group working with heart and dedication, determined to respond to feedback, squash bugs, and show what the game can really do when the rough edges are smoothed out. It is the sort of unseen labour that keeps a modern live service style game alive long after launch day.
The problem is that passion cannot pay salaries on its own. Without fresh funding, or stronger support and enthusiasm from the publisher, Sperry explains that there is simply no sustainable way to keep the studio operating in its current form. Self funding an entire year of development, including all the post release work, has drained the company. Being forced to tell colleagues and friends that their jobs may disappear is, in her words, unbelievably painful.
Her post is not just a farewell, though. Alongside the statement, Three Fields has shared a video that showcases the post launch content they have in development for Wreckreation. The footage highlights new creations, improvements, and ideas the team hopes could still expand the audience. By bringing that work into the open, Sperry hopes that potential partners or investors might recognise the game’s promise and step in before it is too late.
Even if that lifeline never comes, she wants the update to stand as proof of the team’s skill. The message is clear; whatever happens to the studio as a business, the people inside it have demonstrated serious craft in systems design, online features, and fast paced driving physics. Wreckreation may be rough around the edges, but it is also the culmination of years of experience in a very specific style of racing game that few studios attempt anymore.
One of the most striking details in Sperry’s note is her promise that, once again at the studio’s own expense, Three Fields will still deliver the next big update for Wreckreation. That patch, planned for release before Christmas, is set to add crossplay so that players on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox can share the same chaotic world. For fans who already own the game, that means they will be able to enjoy a more connected, populated sandbox even as the studio that built it fights for survival.
This crisis does not come out of nowhere. Wreckreation is the second major attempt from Three Fields to rekindle the spirit of classic crash heavy racers. In 2019 the team released Dangerous Driving, a spiritual successor to Burnout that drew some praise for its speed but was widely criticised for flat track design, aggressive artificial intelligence, missing features, and an overall rough presentation. Its middling reviews and modest reception signalled how hard it is for small teams to tackle a genre that once relied on big budgets and large staff counts.
The story of Three Fields is sadly emblematic of the wider pressures squeezing mid sized and independent studios across the industry. Development costs have climbed, release windows are crowded, and the revenue structures tied to some publishing deals can leave small teams fronting huge amounts of time and money long before they see a meaningful return. When a launch is anything less than a breakout hit, there is often little margin for course correction.
For players, the situation is bittersweet. On one hand, they are getting more updates, more fixes, and cross platform play for a game that dares to blend creative building with high speed collisions. On the other, those improvements may be arriving as part of a swan song for the group that dreamed it up. For the developers at Three Fields, the coming months will determine whether Wreckreation becomes a foundation to build on or a final statement of what might have been.
Regardless of the outcome, Sperry’s message reads as both a heartfelt thank you to the community and a quiet warning about how fragile game development can be, even for veterans with a beloved heritage. Wreckreation was built by people who helped define an era of arcade racing. Now, only a month after release, that legacy is at risk of being cut short by the unforgiving maths of modern publishing.
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