That game was so amazingly made I wouldn’t be surprised if ChatGPT was responsible for 90% of it, including the suggestion to make a Gollum video game.

I recently watched the documentary this article talks about on why Gollum had to fail the way it did. It was a very informative piece, questioning a lot of the devs and the company in question, and receiving in-depth answers from them (sometimes anonymous).

It boiled down to exactly what you would expect. Overworked developers and artists, who regularly were subjected to crunch, while also being criminally underpaid (some of them even weren't considered real employees and just voluntary interns, so the company could dodge german minimum wage).
None of them made a bad videogame on purpose, they were just insanely underfunded, not experienced enough in this new genre and the new engine and on top of that, the rights to the LotR IP were time-limited, so they had to release it sooner or later.

The "apology" that was tweeted out, was actually sent out without any of the devs input or knowledge, by their parent company "nacon". And yes, ChatGPT was likely used for it.

Source here (it's in german, but english CC are available)

My Precious,

Nasty, tricksy apologies, we must give. Yes, yesss, we must, my precious. We's been naughty, we has, with our previous letter about our precious game 'Gollum.' We's sorry, oh yes, very, very sorry.

Nasty, precious feedback we got, and we knows it's true. We takes it back, oh yes, we does. We wants to make our precious 'Gollum' better, we does, for all the good players out there.

We promises, my precious, to make it right. Changes and fixes, we'll bring them, oh yes, we will. We'll listen to our precious players and make it better, we will.

Forgive us, my precious, for our earlier mistake. We didn't mean to hurt you, no, not at all. We loves our precious players, we does, and we'll make 'Gollum' shine, just for you.

Thank you, my precious, for being patient. We'll make it better, we swears.

I don’t mind people using ChatGPT to write. Certain things are so straightforward that it doesn’t make sense to exert additional energy. I was debating a friend the other day and prompted ChatGPT with my viewpoints and had it take over. It is an amazing tool.

They're just trying this on to see if people will believe them if they claim they used chat gpt to write the game