EXCLUSIVE: Ashes of Creation Developer Intrepid Lays Off 13 Devs For No Apparent Reason

Starbreeze, Skeleton Key, Striking Distance, PlayStation – it seems that after more than two years of non-stop layoffs across the gaming industry, development studios, both large and small, have adopted a new approach of keeping job cuts under wraps for as long as possible, replacing formal announcements with formulaic, one-sentence responses to the press, insider reports, and LinkedIn posts as the only ways for the public to learn that the terminations happened in the first place.

Joining this list is Intrepid Studios, the creators of the upcoming sandbox MMORPG Ashes of Creation, which recently conducted a round of job cuts – which, interestingly enough, they refused to acknowledge as "layoffs" – but did so in a secretive manner, without any public statement, leaving the community with more questions than answers.

For this report, we have gathered both publicly available yet deeply buried information about the company's "non-layoffs," as well as insights from Intrepid employees who, for obvious reasons, chose to remain anonymous.

Regarding the former, the eliminations took place sometime in late February and were first mentioned – of all places – on the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) San Diego Discord channel, with Intrepid's developers confirming that some of their teammates had indeed been let go.

Soon after, the studio's Director of Communications, Margaret Krohn, joined the conversation to state that they "did not have layoffs" but rather "parted ways with a few developers because they were not good fits for our project," burying the issue in semantics. "A layoff is when you are letting folks go because of economical reasons, and that is not the case for us," Krohn explained, noting that despite the "non-layoffs," Ashes of Creation's development continues as planned, with Intrepid continuing to work on the game and hiring new staff moving forward.

Amused and bemused by Krohn's statement, I reached out to a few of the studio's workers to get clarity on what has actually happened at Intrepid. According to what they told me, as well as messages shared on Discord by Intrepid employees, the studio terminated 13 employees, affecting all departments without any specific target.

As for why this baker's dozen was fired, it was apparently described to those affected as an "at-will termination," with no reason provided whatsoever, and HRs reportedly going so far as to state that they didn't need to have a reason. From what we've heard, some of the developers impacted by the layoffs had been with the team for a long time and made significant contributions to Ashes of Creation's production, leaving one to wonder what the real reason might have been.

According to our sources, despite the cuts, AoC remains largely unaffected, with the same roadmap, timeline, pipeline, and tasks still in place – the only difference being that there are now fewer people to handle them. Given that no reason was provided for the layoffs, while everything else remains the same, it's reasonable to speculate that Intrepid may have aimed to cut costs by replacing high-salary veterans with cheaper interns, however, this remains purely an assumption and, at present, cannot be confirmed.

So, where does this leave us? If you're a gamer simply awaiting AoC's launch, the situation probably won't impact you much. Both the management, represented by Krohn, and the actual developers insist that the job cuts won't disrupt the pipeline, and given that 13 people out of the studio's 195-strong workforce account for just around 6%, this seems likely to be the case.

However, if you're a game developer, or even one of the affected by the layoffs in recent years, this situation marks an unfortunate continuation of not only the layoffs trend and the growing secrecy surrounding them, but also a new level of management behavior – masking firings with semantics to save face and proudly claim that they "didn't have layoffs."

Fired, laid-off, terminated, eliminated, cut, let go, dismissed, sacked, axed, made redundant – however you choose to spin it, the outcome remains the same: people have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, and claiming that you didn't have layoffs but merely "parted ways with a few developers" comes across as disingenuous, to put it mildly. To wrap things up, here's an excerpt from Intrepid Studios' official website, which, given the circumstances, seems in urgent need of revision:

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