Massive Layoffs at Cryptic Studios

[Apparition]

Yesterday, it was announced that Cryptic Studios' newest online game Magic: Legends will shutter on October 31st, 2021.  The game has only been in open beta for three months.

 

Today, it was announced that there has been massive layoffs at Cryptic Studios with pretty much everyone that worked on Magic: Legends terminated.

 

Quote

“Cryptic Studios has decided to cancel Magic Legends for poor financial performance, which sadly means I am without a job,” tweeted Aaron Walz, who’d been a Senior Sound Designer at Cryptic working on the title. “They laid off 44 employees this morning. Please forward any sound designer opportunities. […] I enjoyed making the sound for this game and am very sad. […] The rest of the audio dept is safe because they don’t work on Magic. I was in charge of Magic and on that team, so sadly, my position was eliminated. […] I do have to say, Cryptic handled it very professionally and caringly – as much as possible, anyway. Our CEO was extremely emotional and choked up.”

 

 

Here's hoping that everyone laid off from Cryptic Studios this week land on their feet quickly.

[WanderingAries]

I guess the studio didn't have any other projects going on to redirect the resources huh?

[Kyksie]

I played the "Beta" of Magic Legends, and it was terrible. I'm putting "Beta" in "quotes" because it was basically "Here it is, there's bugs but start giving us money anyway". Crummy graphics, poorly optimized, and the gameplay managed to be too simple and too complex at the same time, a goal many bad games strive for but few achieve. It's really sad how far down the toilet Cryptic has slid in the past 20 years.

[Darmian]

22 minutes ago, Kyksie said:

I played the "Beta" of Magic Legends, and it was terrible. I'm putting "Beta" in "quotes" because it was basically "Here it is, there's bugs but start giving us money anyway". Crummy graphics, poorly optimized, and the gameplay managed to be too simple and too complex at the same time, a goal many bad games strive for but few achieve. It's really sad how far down the toilet Cryptic has slid in the past 20 years.

Like many a thing, the impetus that made it great, those initial people and their goals/abilities/dedication - whatever anyone may think of them - that did not carry forward it seems.

[GraspingVileTerror]

A studio name is often just that:  A name.

The people and talent who make up a studio change over time.  At most you'll see a director or producer or team lead carrying the torch, but that's no guarantee that the actual chemistry which made up the winning team for past titles will be present during any other.
And in this case, by the sounds of it, the team in question was operating on this specific project, and not any of the other titles currently in production at Cryptic.

 

Not sure whose bright idea it was to start charging for micro-transactions while still officially declaring it a "Beta."

If you're collecting money for an active product, it's Release, frankly.  No matter how unpolished or unfinished it is from the intended end state.

 

But like just about every project I've been involved in, you can't blame the people who inevitably get fired.  They're not the ones who have the power or authority to make the decisions which lead to their mass layoffs, after all.

[Darmian]

49 minutes ago, GraspingVileTerror said:

But like just about every project I've been involved in, you can't blame the people who inevitably get fired.  They're not the ones who have the power or authority to make the decisions which lead to their mass layoffs, after all.

If I had a penny for every time this happened, well my donations once a month to HC would be a LOT bigger.

[SuperPlyx]

-"cancel Magic Legends for poor financial performance"

-"game has only been in open beta for three months"

-"charging for micro-transactions while still officially declaring it a "Beta."

 

What the hell.....

[Apparition]

1 hour ago, SuperPlyx said:

-"cancel Magic Legends for poor financial performance"

-"game has only been in open beta for three months"

-"charging for micro-transactions while still officially declaring it a "Beta."

 

What the hell.....

 

 

Welcome to gaming since around 2015.

[Kyksie]

When you promise no wipes and start taking people's money, that's a launch. You can call it an "open beta" or a "late beta" or a "foonting turlingdrome", it's still a launch.

[wjrasmussen]

On 7/2/2021 at 4:18 AM, GraspingVileTerror said:

A studio name is often just that:  A name.

The people and talent who make up a studio change over time.  At most you'll see a director or producer or team lead carrying the torch, but that's no guarantee that the actual chemistry which made up the winning team for past titles will be present during any other.
And in this case, by the sounds of it, the team in question was operating on this specific project, and not any of the other titles currently in production at Cryptic.

 

Not sure whose bright idea it was to start charging for micro-transactions while still officially declaring it a "Beta."

If you're collecting money for an active product, it's Release, frankly.  No matter how unpolished or unfinished it is from the intended end state.

 

But like just about every project I've been involved in, you can't blame the people who inevitably get fired.  They're not the ones who have the power or authority to make the decisions which lead to their mass layoffs, after all.

I am still offended at charging for alpha/beta.   Oh well.

[ForeverLaxx]

7 hours ago, wjrasmussen said:

I am still offended at charging for alpha/beta.   Oh well.

This seems to be what every game company wants to do now, particularly in the Indie sector. Charge people a fee for "early access" to their game with lots of promise, but not a lot of polish, get people through the door with that promise, then disappear into the sunset with the cash. Why continue to develop a game after you already made bank on just the bare bones alpha?

 

It really makes trying to get into newer releases all the more difficult, and with budgets for games getting way out of control in the AAA sector (and their tendency to shoehorn in-game monetization for further milking), I don't have high hopes for the future of the industry as a whole.

 

Pretty soon, everything is going to be a mobile gacha experience based out of China and I'm not looking forward to it.

[Moka]

City of Heroes was honestly a lucky shot from Cryptic. I hear Star Trek Online is good but Star Trek's never been my thing. Champions did a lot right but even more wrong, and Neverwinter Online was a major disappointment for how hyped up it was. 

[TheOtherTed]

I enjoyed my time in Star Trek Online.  The main problem I had with it is that it wasn't Star Trek - or, rather, it didn't feel like it.  Destroying entire fleets and trouncing multiple ground squads in every mission kinda fell short of the whole "explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations" thing.  Granted, that's hard (if not impossible) to do in a multiplayer game, but I found myself seriously questioning how the "bad guys" were assembling so many ships so quickly, recruiting people so rapidly, yet utterly failing at winning through sheer numbers.

 

In fact, I ended up exclusively doing PVP on the Klingon side just to keep the cognitive dissonance at bay.  I will say, that was the most PVP fun I've had in any game - until Cryptic decided to massively "streamline" the skill trees and pretty much kill ground combat.  I quit after that, but I still poke my head in once every couple of years.  PVP (and my interest in it) is pretty much dead now, though, or it was last time I sniffed around it.  However, props to whoever wrote the Klingon side PVE missions.  That made up for much of not-so-benign neglect us Klingons put up with the first couple of years.

 

Got some good mileage out of Champions Online - but I had to turn the music off to play it.  NWO was like they took the CO style music and made it visible.  Couldn't spend more than 20 minutes in that game.  Oh, well.

[Dona Eis Requiem]

On 8/28/2021 at 10:50 AM, Moka said:

City of Heroes was honestly a lucky shot from Cryptic. I hear Star Trek Online is good but Star Trek's never been my thing. Champions did a lot right but even more wrong, and Neverwinter Online was a major disappointment for how hyped up it was. 

Honestly, Neverwinter was the only MMO I could find any enjoyment in for a short while after CoH went *poof*.  

That died off rather quickly though as it soon became impossible to progress at a decent pace if you weren't a P2W whale. 

Call me old-fashioned, I suppose. I miss the days of having my game in-hand and only paying for expansions or subs where regular content was the reward for my money.

[PeregrineFalcon]

19 hours ago, TheOtherTed said:

However, props to whoever wrote the Klingon side PVE missions.  That made up for much of not-so-benign neglect us Klingons put up with the first couple of years.

Fun fact. Matt Miller, aka Positron, wrote the Klingon story missions that launched with Legacy of Romulus.

 

They finally hired him back in order to write the Klingon story missions after spending years lying to us on the forums telling us that they were working on Klingon content when they weren't.

[Moka]

Funny Matt Miller did that when he said he hated redside. (Unless I misread him in the AMA)

[GraspingVileTerror]

I think Miller had stated that he had wrote off Redside, since he recognized that it was in a perpetual downward spiral from the get-go.

So, less that he hated Redside, and more that he had given up on it.

[El D]

Yeah, what @GraspingVileTerror said. Redside never got the numbers to make it worth much dev time back in the day. It's always had just a fraction of the players Blueside did - even now on Homecoming it's still like that. Probably part of the reason why the Live devs focused on cross-side stuff (RWZ, Dark Aatoria, Incarnate trials) for the longest time. It was easier to build one big thing everyone could do rather then invest time in side-specific content hardly anyone would play more than once (if they even ran it the first time).

 

Kind of makes me wonder if we might have eventually gotten a Redside revamp had the game stayed live long enough, and sad as it is this thread makes me glad it would have been Paragon Studios doing it rather than Cryptic. x.x

Edited August 30, 2021 by El D

[TheOtherTed]

2 hours ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Matt Miller, aka Positron, wrote the Klingon story missions that launched with Legacy of Romulus.

I learned something today.  Thank you.

 

I also learned today that you don't clean affinity columns with high concentration sodium hydroxide, but that's beside the point.

[PeregrineFalcon]

2 hours ago, Moka said:

Funny Matt Miller did that when he said he hated redside. (Unless I misread him in the AMA)

Paragon Studios had recently folded and Matt was looking for a job. I suspect that fact trumped all other considerations for him.

 

That being said, he did excellent work on the KDF story line. In my opinion it's the best story in the game, thanks to Positron.

[A Cat]

On 8/28/2021 at 7:07 AM, ForeverLaxx said:

This seems to be what every game company wants to do now, particularly in the Indie sector. Charge people a fee for "early access" to their game with lots of promise, but not a lot of polish, get people through the door with that promise, then disappear into the sunset with the cash. Why continue to develop a game after you already made bank on just the bare bones alpha?

 

It really makes trying to get into newer releases all the more difficult, and with budgets for games getting way out of control in the AAA sector (and their tendency to shoehorn in-game monetization for further milking), I don't have high hopes for the future of the industry as a whole.

 

Pretty soon, everything is going to be a mobile gacha experience based out of China and I'm not looking forward to it.

I've perhaps had some nonstandard experience with this. The Forest and Valheim I got on early access and both were extremely good even then. Diablo 3 and Farcry 2 I got full price as complete games and both sucked out of the box (D3 eventually got pretty good after many updates, but the writing and hammy dialogue still sucked). I guess you never really know until you play the game if you'd like it or not. 

[UltraAlt]

On 7/2/2021 at 7:18 AM, GraspingVileTerror said:

A studio name is often just that:  A name.

The people and talent who make up a studio change over time

 

On 7/2/2021 at 7:18 AM, GraspingVileTerror said:

Not sure whose bright idea it was to start charging for micro-transactions while still officially declaring it a "Beta."

 

The Financial people behind the gaming companies or whoever is paying the gaming company to create content.

To me, Kickstarter is the the same thing. You aren't investing in the profits of the product, you are giving the company money to invest for their future profits.

 

But this isn't limited to online activities. The electric company that I get my electrical power from keeps sending me information on how to pay extra to have them provide me with green energy. Yes. Sounds great for the environment; I'm +1 on that. However, they are upgrading their equipment and building green energy facilities, so I'm already getting green energy from them from the standard rate. So my thing is, even if the extra money that I'm giving them is going to build green energy facilities and Earth will be profiting, they will be profiting off of my "donation" to building new green power plants. Buying stock would be achieving the same goal to provide capital but at the end of the day, their profits will mean profits for you as well. Just saying.

 

I know that in the end that any support of a game is simply giving profits to those on the other side, but it seem to be that Kickstarters and paid betas are giving money to people to try to get their companies off the ground. If they fail, you just lost out all you put into it. Those that failed walk away with whatever profits they made to fail to produce a finished product or sustainable money-making venture.

 

[Greycat]

On 7/2/2021 at 6:18 AM, GraspingVileTerror said:

A studio name is often just that:  A name.

 

 

See: Atari

Then: Game developer, console maker, leader in industry

Now: Name attached to overpriced (even if I like the case) Linux console and emulator, pusher of failing cryptocurrency.

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

On 7/11/2021 at 3:46 PM, SuperPlyx said:

-"cancel Magic Legends for poor financial performance"

-"game has only been in open beta for three months"

-"charging for micro-transactions while still officially declaring it a "Beta."

 

What the hell.....

 

Ah, the "EA model".