Stardock Confirms Layoffs in Wake of Elemental Launch Problems

Brad Wardell confirmed that Stardock was forced to lay off several employees in the wake of the bungled launch of Elemental: War of Magic. On Friday reports from Shacknews and Joystiq said that the company had laid off several employees in anticipation of dwindling sales and a general lack of interest in the game.

Wardell had alluded to this late last week in a forum post on the Elemental boards, taking full responsibility for the sorry state of the game at launch and saying that there would be strong repercussions for the company. We assume these layoffs are one of those repercussions.

Here's what Wardell said in confirming the stories about lay offs in the Elemental Forums:

Elemental's revenue was anticipated to provide the revenue both for our main games team's next project as well as a second team. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen so we've had to start laying people off.

No one is being fired. None of these people did anything wrong. Stardock is a small company and each person here is truly amongst the best and brightest. So you can imagine how much it sucks for all of us to lay off anyone. We haven't had to lay anyone off since our migration from the OS/2 market in 1998. It would be great if we can bring as many of these people back over time if the studio can afford it.

No one involved on the core components of Elemental is affected.

Elemental's rocky launch can be summed up (IMO) as follows: Our QA process was insufficient to handle a brand new platform (Elemental = Kumquat 1.0 versus say Galactic Civilizations II was using Pear which was the same engine, modified, from 1997's Entrepreneur) + my own catastrophic poor judgment in not objectively evaluating the core game play components.

The latest update to the game, version 1.07 does fix many of the technical issues including a major bug that slowed down the late game, but there's still a lot of work to be done on fundamental issues with core gameplay. But one thing that hasn't changed is Stardock's commitment to the game, which it plans to keep working on for the foreseeable future. One thing Wardell had mentioned in passing is that the first full expansion will be free due to all the trouble early adopters had to go through at launch.

On a related note, episode 34 of GameShark's Jumping the Shark podcast (with Three Moves Ahead podcaster Troy Goodfellow guest starring) dissects some of the core problems with the game and discusses the practice of releasing games too early. It's good stuff. The next episode of the Three Moves Ahead podcast will feature Wardell talking about what went wrong with Elemental and what his company plans to do about it in the long term..