Ascendant Studios, who made last year’s Immortals of Aveum, seem to be in a dire state.
As revealed by Polygon senior reporter Nicole Carpenter on Twitter, most of Ascendant’s employees are now on furlough. She shared a screencap from someone’s LinkedIn with this message:
“Ascendant Studios has furloughed the majority of their staff. I can’t imagine what that would be like as that is worse than getting laid off. Stuff like this shouldn’t fly under the radar.”
Nicole then captions this with her own verification:
“This lines up with what I’ve heard at Immortals of Aveum developer Ascendant Studios — that a large portion of the staff was recently furloughed. Haven’t been able to confirm numbers, and Ascendant hasn’t responded to multiple requests for comment.”
If you’re lucky enough to not know what a furlough is, this is when businesses stop operations and stop paying their employees. Furloughed employees are not laid off, and they are still entitled to their benefits, such as medical.
Businesses usually put their employees on furlough when they are not able to continue operations, for any possible reason, but they want to retain said employees. If the company finds a way to go back to work, they can then call their employees to literally return to work. There are state specific rules relating to furloughs, but what we need to know here is that Ascendant would not have gone through this trouble, as they have to meet stringent legal requirements, if they did not feel they had to do this.
Ascendant Studios managed to snag EA as their publisher for Immortals of Aveum. Unfortunately, the game’s poor sales, which they hadn’t been able to truly recover from led to them having to fire half of their employees last year. So this is the other half of their staff, now placed in furlough.
We don’t know the particulars of what’s going on with Ascendant Studios right now, but there is one thing to be said. When Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch went to bat for Embracer, a lot of fans and gamers, even other developers, scoffed at him. But Karch’s defense of how Embracer went about their layoffs hinted at something we can now see here.
As the person who shared this news pointed out on LinkedIn, where Ascendant’s employees are right now ‘is worse than being laid off.’ Unlike the former staff at Volition, who were able to form a new studio in ShapeShifter, they can’t just go find a new company, or make a new one themselves, because they don’t know if they’ll get their old jobs back.
So under that uncertainty, most, if not all, of them will just sit down without a monthly wage and wait. Wait because they still have their benefits, wait because they don’t know if they can find work, wait because this job is the reason they moved. It’s bound to be a terrible time for those employees right now.
GameRanx wishes the furloughed employees at Ascendant Studios well, and we hope that the issues in their company can be resolved shortly.
