This seems to be ~20% of their total workforce.
That’s not unusual for games studios after shipping a game unfortunately. It likely means that they don’t have another project ramping up after finishing the Callisto Protocol DLC.
This is a studio wholey owned by a big company (pubg people), so the normal end of contracts after a game releases isn’t expected or normal at all. That’s because companies have to sell another publisher on a game to have a full workforce. That’s why those companies contract developers rather than employ.
This is employed people being laid off, it’s not normal, it is unusual.
It’s pretty known that this game didn’t sell as well as they had hoped. Or at least that’s what I thought was the scenario.
End of contract stuff is an issue in the industry, with 15-18% being contractors, but that’s it’s a separate one - if you’re a contractor you’re going to need to find a new job no matter what at the end of the project unless you get lucky enough to snag a permanent role.
Layoffs for salaried employees at the end of a project is a systematic problem in the industry - This is a really good article from 2014 that’s covers a lot of the issues.
I REALLY REALLY wanted this game to pan out because I love the genre. Too bad it flopped hard :(.
I bought it day 1 with the intent of (at a minimum) giving it a try until my refund period ran out and it ran like ass. The opening cutscene was a slideshow and that’s with me running a Ryzen 7 5800x, GTX 3070, and 32gb of ram. I started googling to see if it was an issue with drivers or my system and that was when I started seeing reviews for it that weren’t too great. I went ahead and refunded it at that point.
I ran it a couple months ago on a Ryzen 5600x paired with ab6800xt. Game ran brilliantly. I also really enjoyed it. I just didn’t go in expecting it to be dead space. I wanted something new and a little different and that’s exactly what I got. I was surprised I could even play it on steam deck.
TBH, it was literally Day 1 hours after they released it. I think they patched the issue within a couple days, but by then I had already refunded. I’m impressed that it runs on Steam Deck. That’s some good optimization especially for a triple A game that just came out.
Yeah, I ran it mostly low settings, fsr and probably between 30-40 fps. So for tons of people that’d be a no go, but I was just excited to play it before I could get back to my rig.
Yeah two months ago, they basically had patched a majority of the week 1 disappointment. So for me, I had a fresh and reasonable experience. So many studios are releasing under optimized games and patching after sales start.
I absolutely adore the first two Dead Space games and I could not believe my eyes when this turned out to be a shitty corridor shooter/button masher with like four enemy types.
I am sad this game didn’t work out. I mostly enjoyed it, they did pretty good job fixing it after the launch despite the problems and I just like the genre enough so I would have definitely played another game of this.
Oh well, I hope at some point Glenn makes another horror game.
This game was the definition of video game movie. I seriously think it’s probably just as good of an experience to watch it on YouTube as it is to play and that’s probably not a good trait.
I’m always bummed when a super-hyped game doesn’t perform well. I’m not into this genre so I don’t really know if I’ll ever play it to find out for myself why.
