Motiga, a Bellevue-based game developer behind the yet-to-be-released Xbox One and Windows 10 game Gigantic, laid off a “significant percentage” of employees today.
In a blog post, Motiga CEO Chris Chung explained that his six-year-old company’s financial situation “is such that we are unable to continue supporting the entirety of the studio at this time.” He called the layoffs “temporary.”
“Though we are in active and promising discussions with a number of potential investors, the timing for those negotiations extends beyond the resources we have to maintain the staffing required to continue development on Gigantic,” Chung wrote.
Chung added that the layoffs may affect Gigantic beta testers, “as the services they depend on will operate without the key staff on hand to support those services,” the CEO wrote. Gigantic was originally set to debut at the end of 2015 after two years of development but has since been delayed.
This is the second round of layoffs in the past two months for Motiga. Windows Central reported about the company’s layoffs in December which slashed 25 percent of its workforce (16 employees).
We’ve reached out to Motiga for more details about the number of employees let go today and will update when we hear back.
The company’s investors include individual angels and South Korean online gaming companies Neowiz and Smilegate. Chung is a game industry veteran, previously acting as chief strategy officer at Trion Worlds. His CTO, another industry veteran Rick Lambright, is a former tech executive at Sierra Online and Sony Online Entertainment. Other execs previously worked at Monolith, Warner Bros.
Here’s the full letter from Chung:
It is with deep heartache that Motiga announces the temporary layoff of a significant percentage of our studio today. Our financial situation is such that we are unable to continue supporting the entirety of the studio at this time. Though we are in active and promising discussions with a number of potential investors, the timing for those negotiations extends beyond the resources we have to maintain the staffing required to continue development on Gigantic.
While we intend to continue supporting Gigantic game services for as long as we are able, the reality is that a decision of this magnitude will impact all departments across the studio, an impact that will be felt by our community of beta testers as the services they depend on will operate without the key staff on hand to support those services.
Owing to our commitment to transparency, both to our studio and the Gigantic community, this is a decision that has been shared with every member of our team before the posting of this article.
Motiga continues to engage in active discussions with our partners to identify ways to remedy this situation, but we are not in a position to provide any specific information on our next steps at this time. It is of course our goal, and our deep hope, that we are able to secure the necessary funding in the near future in order to bring Gigantic to market.
We would like to thank everyone for their support over the last few months, and while the situation is far from ideal, the sheer number of people that have enjoyed playing Gigantic has affirmed what we’ve believed all along: while we still have a lot of work to do to polish the experience for the players, the current closed beta version of our game introduces a legitimately fun gameplay experience with great promise for the future.
Our goal at this time is to work aggressively to identify the resources we need to rehire the members of the Motiga family that were laid off today, securing our financial future so that the Gigantic community can continue to work with us to develop this title, and ultimately bring the complete Gigantic experience to the marketplace.
We will continue to keep our community, and the world-at-large, apprised of this situation as it continues to unfold over the coming weeks.
