According to the latest reports, 29 employees have been made redundant, most of them from the Molasses Flood team working on The Witcher game.
Last week, we were pleased to hear that Project Sirius, the The Witcher spinoff game being developed at CD Projekt’s Molasses Flood studio, was back on track. It ran into some trouble earlier this year, as you may recall. However, due to a change of direction for the project, 29 people, mostly Molasses Flood staff, were made redundant.
Sirius was revealed in October 2022 to be “an innovative approach to The Witcher universe” being developed by Molasses Flood with support from CD Projekt Red.
CD Projekt acquired Molasses Flood six months earlier, in April 2022. The studio’s previous games include The Flame in the Flood and Drake Hollow.
However, in March this year, CD Projekt wrote off a significant portion of the game’s development costs to date. It then said it would re-evaluate the game’s “scope and commercial potential” and “define a new framework”.
Last week, A regulatory report announced that “work to define a new framework for Project Sirius” had been completed. It also said that, as a result, some of the financial write-offs had been reversed. Shortly afterwards, however, several Molasses Flood employees took to social media to say they had been made redundant. Today, CD Projekt confirmed the layoffs in a statement.
“As the project has changed, so has the composition of the team working on it – especially on The Molasses Flood side,” said a company representative.
“The specific number of people who have parted ways is 21 team members in the US and 8 in Poland (working on the project outside the US)”.
CD Projekt declined to comment further on the matter. But 29 redundant employees potentially represent a very deep cut to the development team. More than 60 people were working on Sirius when it was unveiled last year. It is not known how much the team has expanded since then. The short time between the announcement and the shambles didn’t give much time for expansion. The LinkedIn business social media platform currently has 11-50 employees at The Molasses Flood. This is by no means an accurate measurement, but it is clearly a relatively small studio.
Project Sirius is one of five The Witcher games currently in development at CD Projekt, with an all-new trilogy in the works. It is also a remake of the original Witcher RPG, which is being “rebuilt from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5”.
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
