Frontier, the studio behind Elite: Dangerous, has had to axe 14 people. It’s not nearly as bad as some of our other layoff stories that we’ve been hearing. They obviously aren’t going through huge department cuts, but that probably isn’t comforting news to the nine artists, three animators, and two audio technicians that have lost their jobs. It stings doubly hard considering that they lost their job right before the holidays.
These layoffs come in the middle of the Kickstarter campaign for Elite: Dangerous. It’s looking to raise £1.25 million for the Elite revival project, and is more than half-way there with more than two weeks left.
Frontier had this to say about the recent layoffs: “Once we took the decision to make the roles redundant, we felt it was better that the affected people knew ASAP so they can plan any further expenditure over the Christmas period accordingly and focus on their search for new roles as soon as possible. We have provided redundancy arrangements in excess of the minimum.”
That statement sounds a little robotic, but if they are giving their employees help in finding new positions, then they can be as robotic as they’d like.
Source: GamesIndustry.biz