Immortals Of Aveum Developer Has Laid Off Almost Half Its Staff

Former staff at EA's BioWare studio are taking the developer to court in an effort to get improvement severance pay.

The Last of Us maker Naughty Dog is reportedly among the latest game studios to be hit with layoffs. As per Kotaku, the first-party PlayStation studio is cutting off at least 25 developers, with the most affected members being quality assurance (QA) testers, whose contracts have been shortened. Affected workers are expected to continue working until the end of October, and they allegedly won't be receiving any severance payments. Turns out, the full-time staff — last recorded headcount being 400+ in July — are not being laid off, with employees in general being ‘pressured' to keep the news internal.

The lawsuit alleges Aspyr Media and Saber Interactive misled customers by selling KOTOR 2 with the promise of its now canceled Restored Content DLC.

Epic Games is reportedly laying off around 16% of its workforce.

Blizzard Entertainment has laid off several members of the Hearthstone development team, citing «organizational changes» at the studio.

One developer had been with the company for 18 years.

Payday 3 just recently launched into the marketplace. It’s certainly had a following of players eager to try the game out. Likewise, the title is available on the Xbox Game Pass subscription service. So, there are plenty of players who are able to gain access to the title. However, very few are finding it to be a seamless experience. With the game requiring an always-online connection, the matchmaking service has failed to keep up, forcing players to deal with waiting for the services to be up and running. 

Beamdog, the studio founded by former BioWare developers Trent Oster and Cameron Tofer, is best known for re-releases of CRPGs like Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights, and Icewind Dale. It was acquired by Embracer Group earlier this year, and its latest game, Mythforce (which is basically Vermintide if it looked like a He-Man cartoon) came out of early access this month. It's the kind of online co-op game that would benefit from robust post-launch support, which makes now a particulaly rough time for 26 members of the team to be laid off.

Crystal Dynamics, the game development studio best known for its work on the Tomb Raider, Gex, and Legacy of Kain series, confirmed yesterday (Wednesday, September 20) that it has parted ways with 10 employees “due to an internal restructuring”.

Almost half of the entire workforce at Ascendant Studios has been laid off as a result of poor sales for its magical FPS Immortals of Aveum. Speaking to Polygon, three employees at the developer said «nearly half of its staff» was let go on Thursday, with bad sales of the game cited as one reason why. Sources claimed around 40 people were laid off from a studio that had 80 to 100 employees.

Ascendant Studios, the developers of EA’s first-person-shooter-with-spells Immortals of Aveum, has laid off dozens of staff just weeks after the game’s release.

Just weeks following the launch of Immortals of Aveum, developer Ascendant Studios has laid off approximately 45% of its team, according to a report by Polygon’s Nicole Carpenter and testimony from some of the impacted employees. Ascendant CEO Bret Robbins explained the layoffs in a Twitter post as “a painfully difficult, but necessary decision that was not made lightly.”