Hardware manufacturer and long time sponsor of the fighting games scene Mad Catz has filed for bankruptcy.
The company has been in financial difficulty for some time, mostly thanks to the failure of Rock Band 4, which Mad Catz published. Since then the company has let multiple staff go and has dropped almost all of its eSports sponsorships.
Now all of the directors and officers of the company have resigned effective as March 30, 2017 and the company is now not operational. It has filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy and PricewaterhouseCoopers Inc. has been appointed as the trustee in bankruptcy of the Company’s estate. Basically it’s the end of Mad Catz.
While news like this is never good this is a major blow to the fighting games community for multiple reasons. First off the most obvious is that Mad Catz produced some of the best fighting sticks in recent years, meaning many players will have to find new alternatives. The other is that over the year Mad Catz has sponsored a ton of top players, being the main sponsor of Daigo Umehara for years.