In February, Quantic Dream released into early access a multiplayer game they spent 8 years building, Spellcasters Chronicles. The game flopped on release, with a peak concurrent user count on release of 888 players on Steam and a Steam user review average of 58% positive, 42% negative, and servers closed just 3 months later. The entire dev team on Spellcasters Chronicles, 115 people by launch, is now at risk of being laid off, as Quantic Dream is planning a restructure that will result in the end of their multiplayer development team. The 115 person multiplayer team represents roughly 25% of Quantic Dream's workforce, 115 laid off would make this the largest gaming layoff in France since Blizzard Paris closed in 2020, resulting in roughly 260 people losing their jobs.
The Union representing Quantic Dream employees called for a strike and picket line in front of Quantic Dream's Paris headquarters yesterday, the very same day that a LucasFilm Games representative was coming to the studio for a progress check on Star Wars Eclipse, a game announced at the Game Awards 2021, nearly 5 years ago, which hasn't been seen since. The project is reportedly well behind schedule, due to over-ambitious gameplay plans stalling development, as well as leadership that reportedly do things like not checking on people in their division's work for a month, and then scrapping everything that dev worked on for a month because it doesn't meet the leader's vision.
Members on the Star Wars Eclipse dev team are calling for some or all of their colleagues from the multiplayer team to join them on Star Wars Eclipse, claiming the project is understaffed currently, leading to crunch time being implemented about a month ago to get the game further along before the LucasFilm Games representative arrived to check on it's progress. They say that in the month that the 115 devs have just been sitting around waiting for news about if they would be laid off or not, not working at all, they could have already been trained on Star Wars Eclipse's development tools, and begun assisting on it.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - 5 hours ago
