Star Citizen: CIG Leaves (Most of) America?
A gamble in dire times? Or a misunderstanding following some loud rumors?
It’s no secret that 2023 was dire for the Star Citizen crowdfunding project, with a significant portion of the year plagued with poor sales compared to previous. However, towards the end of the year, CIG reportedly managed to stabilize its finances, as indicated by data from public trackers. According to Chris Roberts in internal communications, this had indeed been a ‘record breaking year’ for the company -
however they still ended the year in a deficit.
Some within CIG fear this has prompted what the company’s internal messaging calls a ‘relocation effort’. Several have detailed a contract requiring 6 months of silence in exchange for their severance packages. Notable CIG fires/losses reportedly included key leadership for the PU, causing major shakeups in structure. Comments made to PIPELINE had mentioned fears that both ATX and LA studios would soon close.
A discussion with a CIG representative indicates that these fears are likely overblown. While not denying the existence of layoffs,
Tyler Witkin (Zyloh) had made sure to indicate that neither office had planned to close. When I had mentioned that CIG’s job hiring site had been cleared of all but one US job posting (indicating a potential hiring freeze), Tyler indicated 4 more were incoming as well as confidently dismissing a rumor about the fate of the Austin studio as untrue. Commenting specifically about Austin, Tyler detailed the following:
Austin is our publishing and live ops hub. It's literally the building where our physical servers are, the entire platform, release management, Live QA, Live Service Backend team.
ATX is the backbone of data distribution throughout our company globally, both in delivering builds to devs so they can work, but also in releasing patches to the community.
We're certainly not going anywhere.
When asked about CIG’s LA studio, a similar but brief affirmation was given on its continued standard operation.
Were you affected by these layoffs? Does any of this sound inaccurate? Please reach out: contactpipeline@protonmail.com.
Take everything that’s been mentioned with a grain of salt.
robertsspaceindustries.com
The subthread began with a yellow-text funny non-answer and it went downhill from there.
