As the recent release of APB showed, a poor initial reception to a game can have disastrous results. Stardock now knows this all too well from the tepid reaction to their latest title, Elemental: War of Magic.
“I don't think people yet fully realize the completeness of Stardock's fail on Elemental's launch,” wrote Stardock CEO Bard Wardell in a recent forum post. “There will be massive consequences for Stardock's game studio. I'll be talking more about this when I get back. But the game wasn't released early. The game was released poorly. Head in the sand syndrome imo. I've read the reviews as much as possible given my hideous internet access up here and I agree with them. We just didn't see what they were talking about. We thought any complaints would be about polish points or something.“
These 'consequences' were laid out soon afterward in a separate forum post. “Elemental's revenue was anticipated to provide the revenue both for our main games team's next project as well as a second team. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen so we've had to start laying people off,” notes Wardell. “No one is being fired. None of these people did anything wrong. Stardock is a small company and each person here is truly amongst the best and brightest. So you can imagine how much it sucks for all of us to lay off anyone. We haven't had to lay anyone off since our migration from the OS/2 market in 1998. It would be great if we can bring as many of these people back over time if the studio can afford it. No one involved on the core components of Elemental is affected.”
As many as 20 people are rumored to have been laid off.
