“We hope everyone finds work soon.” The creators of the RPG Gloomhaven released a demo of the new game and laid off more than half of their staff in the same day

Hitting production/publishing milestones should be a cause for celebration for game developers. but authors Gloomhaven They cannot celebrate the release of the beta version of their new game – more than half of them just lost their jobs and the development of the project stopped.

A turn-based tactical RPG demo Iron sign It was released on Steam yesterday, but didn’t get much attention. At least if you judge by the activity of users of the Game Forum platform. However, Flaming Fowl Studios hopes that the project will catch the attention of gamers – and there are good reasons for that.

1. Ironmarked on Steam

In an advertisement published on the developer’s Steam website I was informed that the decision to lay off a large part of the team was made due to the “current lack of funds in the gaming industry”. You don’t need to convince anyone of this – the layoffs at Flaming Fowl are just a drop in the ocean of mass market “restructuring”.

In this case, the result was abandonment Iron sign By the current publisher in June 2024. Discussions with 30 other companies yielded no results, so for almost a year the developers had to come up with the funds to produce the game themselves. Unfortunately, they seem to have reached the limit of their capabilities, hence the difficult decision to cut the studio’s workforce by more than half (via Video Game History).

The band also expressed their hope to release a demo version Iron sign It will help people who have had to leave the company – giving them the fruits of their labor, thanks to which they will be able to find work elsewhere. And That enough people wishlist the title so the developer can find funding to complete production. Until then, Flaming Fowl Studios will focus on another, smaller project.

He completed his master’s degree in Polish studies at the University of Warsaw with a thesis devoted to this subject. He started his adventure with GRYOnline.pl in 2015, where he wrote for Games Newsroom, and then for Film and Technology Newsroom (also participated in Games Encyclopedia). He has been into video games (and not just video games) for years. He started with platformers and is still a huge fan of them to this day (including Metroidvanias), but is also into card games (including card games), fighting games, Soulslikes, and basically anything related to games. He can admire pixelated characters from games dating back to the Game Boy era (if not earlier).

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