Cloud Imperium Games seems to be planning the unthinkable.
As shared on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit by AngieK22, the studio has put up some new job openings for their Manchester and Frankfurt studios.
Both job openings have these lines:
As a Cinematic Animator, you will be part of a team of Animators and Cinematic Designers dedicated to bringing to life the performances of some of the best actors in the industry and tying them into the Squadron 42 narrative. You’ll be developing scenes with multiple branching options, deep and emotional narrative, and exciting action.
What do we expect from our Cinematics Animators?
- Professional experience in game animation development, ideally on current/next-gen consoles.
Star Citizen is certainly one of the most notorious games in protracted development, up there with Beyond Good & Evil 2 and Ken Levine’s next title, Judas. Chris Roberts announced the title all the way back in 2012, and then revealed they would spin off a single player campaign, called Squadron 42, in 2014.
Fans and game developers alike have lost patience for Chris Roberts and his extreme approach to making an auteur work out of what was also an extremely ambitious space trading and combat immersive sim. We won’t go through the whole history behind this, but it has led to a high attrition rate in the studio, and many of those backers already giving up on the game.
We’ll jump straight to the most relevant recent news, as in CitizenCon last October 2024, Chris Roberts claimed they were confident they could release Squadron 42 in 2026. While Roberts acknowledged the technical issues that could be seen in their presentation, he simply said that they weren’t ready to release it ‘tomorrow.’
CitizenCon happened a few days before an expose broke about poor working conditions at Cloud Imperium Games. Allegedly they had huge layoffs, but also had high rates of attrition from people leaving.
If these stories are real, these exiting developers were disillusioned that their work on the project would not ever be shown as Roberts and CIG management would keep rejecting their work and moving the goalposts. Subsequently, their technical knowhow was already behind the rest of the industry.
And then, in January of this year, new rumors appeared that Cloud Imperium Games laid off many of their top-level executives as well. If we were to be generous, perhaps these changes really were necessary because Cloud Imperium Games is finally finishing up development.
If that’s the case, then it would also make sense that they’re now hiring people to help work on console ports. Roberts famously said when he first announced the game that the ambitions they had for it were too big for consoles. That was two console generations ago, and they may be actually planning this for 10th generation consoles. But it remains to be seen if Roberts can really make it come together and prove that he really has been making one of the greatest and most ambitious generation defining video games of all time.
