To everyone’s surprise, Cryptic created a small army of “Magic Legends” employees in the hopes of saving the struggling company. The number of layoffs was smaller than people expected, but the news still rocked the game community.
It has been some time since Cryptic Studios cut a lot of its employees and we thought it was time to talk about it. You can see it here, in this interview with Liz Porter. And now, here is a blog post about it.
A flurry of layoffs hit Cryptic yesterday, and we’ve been scouring the web for information about what happened, who was affected, and how.. Read more about layoffs 2021 and let us know what you think.
After yesterday’s shocking news that PWE and Cryptic cancelled and abandoned Magic Legends before the game was even out of beta or released on console, we heard that at least part of the team had been fired, and indeed we reported when other studios began offering their condolences and open positions. But we couldn’t have guessed how many people were laid off instead of transferred to other PWE and Cryptic games. According to a concerned employee who released the employee number, there were at least 44 people.
Cryptic Studios has decided to cancel Magic Legends due to poor financial results, which unfortunately means I’m out of a job, tweeted Aaron Walz, who worked on the game as a senior sound engineer at Cryptic. They fired 44 employees this morning. Contact a sound engineer for each opening. […] I enjoyed making the sound of this game and I’m very disappointed. […] The rest of the audio department is safe because they do not work on Magic. I was in charge of Magic and I was part of that team, so unfortunately my position was dropped. …] I must say that Cryptic handled this matter very professionally and carefully – as far as possible. Our CEO was very emotional and out of breath.
As we noted yesterday, Magic Legends started as an MMORPG that turned into a multiplayer RPG with delays, monetization issues, and a lack of communication from the team. The suddenness of this decision is not obvious. Indeed, if the beta version of the game did not give the impression of working well, an update was made a week ago.
The lights come on on the 31st. October 2021 will be released, but not before PWE has fully repaid the players. Once again, we express our sympathy to those affected by the redundancies.
Source: Twitter. Cheers, Captain Blood.
View
