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League of Geeks: "We'll fight till the last breath"
06.12.2023 - 03:05 / gamesindustry.biz / Trent Kusters
Armello developer League of Geeks has just announced that it's laying off 50% of its staff.
The entire team behind Jumplight Odyssey, which launched in Early Access in August, has been made redundant, with the title put on a hiatus indefinitely as the studio seeks more funding.
In total, 31 people were laid off, including the Jumplight team, staff on the operations and publishing teams, and contractors. Armello's support and Solium Infernum's release (due in February) are not affected by the situation.
Talking to GamesIndustry.biz about the layoffs, studio director and co-founder Trent Kusters doesn't shy away from the exec team's responsibility for the situation, all while shedding light on the context that led up to the redundancies.
He first confirms that affected team members will get "full benefits," with League of Geeks also working with union Game Workers Australia to ensure a smooth process. All staff will get access to a qualified therapist, with League of Geeks also supporting affected folks in finding new jobs – a couple of them have already started elsewhere.
50% of Jumplight Odyssey's profits for the next year is also going to the team that was laid off.
"It seemed wrong [to pull the game down] because we've spent all this time working on it," Kusters explains. "It's just sitting there, it should earn money. We're a business at the end of the day but it feels weird to make a profit. Profit sharing has been at our core. League of Geeks was literally founded on the idea that maybe you can get some people together and make something for profit share.
"We integrated a company profit share system in 2018 and so we were like, well, now is not the time to back away from [our values]. It felt like a great way to honour all those folks on our team. We set up a profit share system specifically for Jumplight so that even if you leave the studio through these redundancies you can still receive profit from the experience. At least folks will know that 50% of the profit that we will see from the game is going to the people who made it, the team who were impacted by this."
We talked to Kusters just last month, and he highlighted then just how much of a difficult time it is for large indie developers, and the importance of being resilient in that space. Neither of us expected to talk again so soon and with such bad news.
The studio was in talks with two major investors to get funding that would have kept it afloat through 2028, but had the rug pulled from under its feet in the span of a few weeks, in what Kusters describes as "the darkest time in League of Geeks' history."
While a wealth of external factors (which we will go through here) contributed to the situation, Kusters insists that he
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