Embracer seems to have laid off staff at Cryptic Studios.
Cryptic may not be a household name like EA or Nintendo, but they have been a successful studio for over 20 years. Founded in 2000, Cryptic’s specialty is in online multiplayer games, mostly MMOs.
Among the games under Cryptic’s belt are Champions Online, Marvel Universe Online, City of Heroes, City of Villains, and Star Trek Online. Their latest game, Neverwinter, was first published in 2013 on Windows, and also got ported to Xbox One and PlayStation 4. All these games did develop their own followings, bolstered by Cryptic’s talent at building persistent worlds players would want to come back to, even with their flaws.
For over a decade, Cryptic was owned and published by Chinese subsisidary Perfect World Entertainment. Like many other studios, they were only very recently acquired by Embracer Group last year. Perfect World was absorbed into Gearbox just last year, and Cryptic became one of Gearbox’s subsidiaries.
As reported by Game Developer, several former employees have come up on LinkedIn to reveal that they and their coworkers were fired from the company. Senior community manager Mike Fatum, and lead environment artist Scot Boyd made these statements on their respective LinkedIn pages. Embracer has yet to officially confirm these layoffs, but of course, these former employees wouldn’t be posting about it on LinkedIn otherwise.
Unfortunately, this is only the latest step in Embracer Group’s plans to restructure their company as a whole. After spending around two years acquiring several smaller developers, including heavy hitters like Gearbox and Crystal Dynamics, the company revealed a large scale deal for an acquisition fell through, forcing them to take these drastic steps.
Thus far, Embracer has instituted layoffs at both Crystal Dynamics and Gearbox, and several of their lesser known studios as well. They also shut down Volition, the developer behind the Saints Row games, following the market failure of their most recent reboot of the franchise.
In this particular case, these firings seem particularly unnecessary and reflect on Embracer’s poor management. If there is a stronger case that studios making single player games are riskier than live service games, Cryptic’s Neverwinter is a live service game.
This studio could have justified staying intact with the promise of a certain steady stream of revenue. Now, it would be harder for Cryptic to reach such a goal, making it also harder for them to contribute to Embracer’s recovery.
