Insider Gaming has shared their latest update in what has become a concerning story for Star Citizen’s studio, Cloud Imperium Games.
Announced all the way back in 2012, Star Citizen is veteran developer Chris Roberts’ huge bet at making a space trading, exploration, and combat game, at an extremely high scale that matches his steep ambitions. That ambition has meant generating an unheard-of amount of crowdfunding, and a record-breaking period of development, that has still not delivered us a finished product.
But all of these are generally understood facts about this project. We sum them up to place our focus on what gamers, even gamers who aren’t interested in Star Citizen, should place their concern in. Because rumors have been swirling for years about a toxic work environment behind the scenes at Cloud Imperium Games, that has led to high attrition rates at the studio.
Before this two-year wave of layoffs, before the pandemic, even before the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were launched, Roberts had allegedly been frustrating his developers with his unreasonably steep expectations. Within this decade, the work environment that crystallized had revolved around trying to live up to what Roberts and management expects, to the point that lower-level staff cannot ‘push back’ on any of these expectations.
Insider Gaming had a blockbuster report last month alleging that Cloud Imperium Games had been misusing funds, and that’s led to developers struggling to make ends meet. But it’s been no secret that Cloud Imperium Games have been forcing their developers to crunch, and that they have not been getting paid and compensated properly.
It’s this alleged abuse of Cloud Imperium Games’ staff that we need to focus on. Regardless of how you feel about Star Citizen itself, if these allegations are true, we should question if this project should even be allowed to continue.
Insider Gaming’s latest update on this story claims that Cloud Imperium Games has once again been laying off staff, since their CitizenCon event last October. They quoted a former employee who tweeted that the company “is letting a lot of staff go over the last two days with zero compensation right after working them to the bone without even much as a thanks,” and that there could be an official announcement about this soon.
Insider Gaming has corroborated these layoffs with their own sources, but don’t know to what extent they have done so. But given that the wave of layoffs of the past two years has shifted from big companies to independent game studios, it’s possible that Star Citizen is about to become a considerably smaller project.
We will reiterate here that we believe that the well-being and career future of the developers is now what is most important in this situation. We would like to hope that Cloud Imperium Games will address these allegations, with transparency and accountability. But for now, we will wait to see if they will make that official announcement about it.
