Star Citizen

Star Citizen team sees multiple departures [UPDATE]

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As of this weekend, at least six people have either left or been fired from Cloud Imperium Games. Many of these have since been confirmed by LinkedIn employment history changes of various now-former employees and various tweets. As usual with developments like these, people are speculating as to the motives for these changes across the web.

And who else weighed in heavily but Derek Smart. In an alleged series of leaks, Smart published his thoughts on the data he head received. His recent posts on the topic of CIG and Star Citizen also included a letter detailing project mismanagement which he apparently obtained from one of the individuals now released form CIG.

Lead Character Artist David Jennison is the often cited source for his letter. Said letter is no loner available through Smart’s site, at the request of jennison. The letter can still be found online though.

Associate Marketing Producer Alyssa Delhotal and Community Manager James Pugh are no longer with Cloud Imperium. This is confirmed by Pugh and Delhotal’s respective LinkedIn profiles (you need an account at the site to be able to read them, but the confirmation is there).

There are further confirmed departures. Senior 3D artist Paul Forgy has left (alleged to have quit on the spot by Smart). Senior Gameplay Programmer Tom Davis and DevOps Engineer Jeffrey Parker have left Cloud Imperium Austin.

All of this exists within a surge of claims that CIG’s burn rate cannot be sustained and that staff departures might continue. These claims are much harder to verify and as of yet remain unsubstantiated.

CIG has released a clarifying statement on the alleged layoffs, their response clarifies that they are in fact streamlining their development process, not laying off staff out of spite or malicious intent.

“Cloud Imperium Games continues to grow its development team across CIG’s multiple studios,” the statement reads. “Each of our four offices is being streamlined to focus on specific parts of Star Citizen which will allow for a more efficient and accelerated completion of the game.”
“As we announced in June with the appointment of Erin Roberts as Global Production Head we have been reviewing how to optimize our development process,” the statement continues. “As a result we are moving some jobs and eliminating some redundant positions between some of our offices, as well as increasing them in others. The net result over the next few months will actually be an increase in our global internal employee base.”

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