Over the last several months, we’ve noted many articles about layoffs within the gaming industry. Two of the three big publishers, Sony and Microsoft, have laid off significant workforce members. Then, you have companies like The Embracer Group, who went out of their way at times to buy gaming companies to “cash in on them,” only for things to backfire and then lay off tons of people. Others have had to get in on this as well due to a “lack of investment” in the gaming space, including indie teams like Flaming Fowl from the UK.
This was a special group of game developers that formed the studio after Microsoft closed their former studio, Lionhead, several years back. Since then, Flaming Fowl has released a set of successful games and was prepping to showcase their third game. It was called Ironmarked, a deck-building game that they put a demo out on Steam for. However, that same day that they did that, they had to pause development and lay off over half their staff.
In a chat with VGC about its situation, CEO Craig Oman noted that the team had been trying for quite some time to get support for this title, and yet people from other publishers weren’t willing to take a leap of faith on them:
“We’ve been working on the game for over a year,” he revealed. “We had a publisher, but they pulled out last year around June, and we’ve been self-funding since August. We’ve been pitching to publishers since then, but they all said, ‘the game looks great, the team looks great, but we’re not signing anything right now’.”
This speaks to the “lack of investment” in the gaming industry we noted earlier, and Oman himself said that a factor that could’ve led to this result was the size of their title:
“Budget wise, we were originally pitching at around £5 million, but it just seemed like there was very little opportunity in that ballpark. People were either looking to sign stuff for a few hundred grand, or up to the £20-40 million range.”
For context, Oman had about 30 people working on the company’s newest game, and now, there are only nine people left in the company, all because they couldn’t get an investor/publisher for a game that they knew they could finish.
If this kind of “lack of faith” continues, many more studios and teams are going to face hurdles like this. Which is why Oman noted that it was truly “painful” what he had to do regarding laying off his staff.
