Firesprite Games has laid off the director of Horizon: Call of the Mountain.
Alex Barnes revealed his status on Twitter:
“Today was my last day at Firesprite and PlayStation, as after nearly 7 years here I am being made redundant. It has been a tough time over the past few months, thank you to all the folks that have continued to help each other through all of this, you have been incredible.
The people at Firesprite and Guerrilla who pulled together to build Horizon Call of the Mountain are some of the most talented and dedicated developers I’ve had the pleasure to work with.
It has been the honour of a lifetime to have been a game director with a team like this.”
This comes three months after Sony revealed they would be laying off 900 employees. Alex’s statement isn’t clear on whether he was part of the announced layoffs at the time, or if this was a new decision. But, this was about more than that announcement.
Shortly after the announcement, news came out of an alleged toxic work environment at Firesprite Games. These include claims of crunch when they were producing Horizon: Call of the Mountain, and mismanaging projects.
Some of the more serious claims were that two higher ups at XDev, who were also working on Horizon: Call of the Mountain, took over senior positions at Firesprite, and those two XDev heads were accused of age and sex discrimination.
Eurogamer started investigations at the time, but we have yet to hear about a follow up. But there’s a part of this story that may be related to Alex’s position being made redundant.
Allegedly, the founders of Firesprite did not leave the company of their own accord. That Sony replaced Firesprite’s management with people they handpicked suggested that they have an outsized level of control at the studio. As the owning company, Sony does have the right to make changes for the benefit of their business, but these decisions seem to be motivated by something else, as it doesn’t look like they helped.
We still don’t know the full picture of what happened and is happening at Firesprite, but this seems to be a bad omen for what will happen to Bungie in its future. Sony gave Bungie’s management more independence, in the expectation that they could get Sony moving forward in their live service initiatives.
I won’t go through all the allegations surrounding Bungie here, but if Sony is taking over that studio, it may not be in Bungie’s best interests in the end. Let’s hope there’s better news for this studio in the horizon.
