CD Projekt confirms layoffs at the Witcher spinoff studio it acquired just a year ago

pcgamer.com:

I was happy to hear last week that Project Sirius, the Witcher spinoff game in development at CD Projekt's Molasses Flood studio, was back on track(opens in new tab) after running into some kind of trouble earlier this year. But as a result of changes to the project's new direction, 29 people, most of them employees at The Molasses Flood, have been laid off.

Sirius was revealed in October 2022 as «an innovative take on The Witcher universe,» being developed by Molasses Flood with support from CD Projekt Red. CD Projekt had acquired Molasses Flood, whose previous games include The Flame in the Flood and Drake Hollow, six months prior to that, in April 2022(opens in new tab).

But in March of this year, CD Projekt wrote off a significant portion of the game's development costs up to that point, and said it was evaluating «the scope and commercial potential» of the game, and «formulating a new framework» for it. 

A regulatory report released last week announced that «work on defining a new framework for Project Sirius» had been completed, and that some of the financial writeoffs had been reversed as a result. But shortly after that, several Molasses Flood employees said on social media that they'd been let go. Today CD Projekt confirmed the layoffs in a statement sent to PC Gamer.

«Because the project changed, so has the composition of the team that's working on it – mainly on The Molasses Flood's side,» a company representative said. «The concrete number of employees we parted ways with is 21 team members in the US and 8 in Poland (working on the project outside of the US).»

Yesterday I was laid off from Molasses Flood.It's not as fun to update the bio this time.I enjoyed the work I'd been doing until my last day and would