Stardock recently launched Elemental: War of Magic and it wasn’t particularly well received. Although the game introduces a number of cool gameplay features and concepts, it is plagued by various technical problems. As a result, it is currently sitting with an average score of 56/100 on Metacritic.
Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has confirmed via an official Elemental forum post, that layoffs have taken place in the wake of the disastrous launch:
“Elemental’s revenue was anticipated to provide the revenue both for our main games team’s next project as well as a second team. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen so we’ve had to start laying people off.”
“No one is being fired. None of these people did anything wrong. Stardock is a small company and each person here is truly amongst the best and brightest. So you can imagine how much it sucks for all of us to lay off anyone. We haven’t had to lay anyone off since our migration from the OS/2 market in 1998. It would be great if we can bring as many of these people back over time if the studio can afford it.”
“No one involved on the core components of Elemental is affected.”
“Elemental’s rocky launch can be summed up (IMO) as follows: Our QA process was insufficient to handle a brand new platform (Elemental = Kumquat 1.0 versus say Galactic Civilizations II was using Pear which was the same engine, modified, from 1997’s Entrepreneur) + my own catastrophic poor judgment in not objectively evaluating the core game play components.”
Stardock remains committed to fixing the technical issues in the game, as Wardell explains in a separate Elemental forum post.
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