{"id":7463,"date":"2010-09-07T14:35:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-07T12:35:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"stardock-begins-layoffs-after-disastrous-elemental-launch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/pc\/7463-stardock-begins-layoffs-after-disastrous-elemental-launch","title":{"rendered":"Stardock begins layoffs after disastrous Elemental launch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Stardock recently launched Elemental: War of Magic and <a href=\"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/pc\/7280-Disastrous-Elemental-launch-spawns-drama-llamas.html\" target=\"_self\" title=\"Disastrous Elemental launch spawns drama llamas\">it wasn&rsquo;t particularly well received<\/a>. 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.metacritic.com\/game\/pc\/elemental-war-of-magic\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Elemental: War of Magic on Metacritic\">56\/100 on Metacritic<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has <a href=\"http:\/\/forums.elementalgame.com\/395168\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Elemental forum\">confirmed via an official Elemental forum post<\/a>, that layoffs have taken place in the wake of the disastrous launch:<br \/><em><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&ldquo;Elemental&#8217;s revenue was anticipated to provide the revenue both for our main games team&#8217;s next project as well as a second team. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen so we&#8217;ve had to start laying people off.&rdquo;<br \/><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&ldquo;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.&nbsp; So you can imagine how much it sucks for all of us to lay off anyone. We haven&#8217;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.&rdquo;<br \/><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&ldquo;No one involved on the core components of Elemental is affected.&rdquo; <br \/><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>&ldquo;Elemental&#8217;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&#8217;s Entrepreneur) + my own catastrophic poor judgment in not objectively evaluating the core game play components.&rdquo;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Stardock remains committed to fixing the technical issues in the game, as Wardell explains in a separate <a href=\"http:\/\/forums.elementalgame.com\/394104\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Elemental forum\">Elemental forum post<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stardock confirms layoffs in the wake of a poor Elemental: War of Magic launch<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":157,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/157"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}