The developers of free-to-play monster hunting game Dauntless have laid off "the majority of the studio" less than two months after the game's troubled launch on Steam. "Today is another difficult day at Phoenix Labs," said the company in a post on LinkedIn, which called the sweeping layoffs "part of unfortunate but necessary changes to our operations." It's the fourth time in two years that the studio has seen job cuts.
The studio has been owned by secretive blockchain company Forte since some time in 2023. Since that year Phoenix Labs have seen three other rounds of layoffs. The studio saw 140 job cuts in May last year, while 34 jobs were axed back in December 2023. Before that, the company cut loose 9 percent of their workers in May 2023.
Over the same period there has been growing player dissatisfaction with Dauntless, which was generally well received when it first arrived. Edwin called it "Monster Hunter for people who fear grind". But recent player reviews complain that free-to-play business tactics have been increasingly interfering with basic design of the game. The game has been on PC and other platforms since 2019 but its arrival to Valve's shopfront in December last year came with a big update called "Awakening".
Alongside a bunch of changes, this update included the bizarre decision to essentially wipe every player's character progression and weapon collections to zero. As you might expect, the game quickly attained an "overwhelmingly negative" review average on the store.
Shortly afterwards, this update was criticised by the studio's former associate producer, Jessie Leigh Gagnon, who said it was no longer "free to slay" in complaints spotted by TechPowerUp.
"They’ve gutted the core gameplay and crafting mechanics," she said in a post on LinkedIn. "The essence of the Slayers (who I named just over ten years ago), has been, in fact, slayed to ribbons. We never would have made decisions that are so blatantly not player focused."
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