As Wayfinder continues to get development updates on its road to full release, developer and publisher Airship Syndicate is reportedly the latest to see layoffs.
The studio has laid off 12 people, as confirmed by Nicole Carpenter, a senior reporter at Polygon. Carpenter also added that “President Ryan Stefanelli and CEO Joe Madureira will cut their pay, too. "This decision was made to ensure that Airship Syndicate can continue to operate and deliver great experiences”. This is indeed an unusual move, especially as the industry has seen so many layoffs over the past year, and even in the one completed month of 2024.
Confirmed 12 people laid off. President Ryan Stefanelli and CEO Joe Madureira will cut their pay, too. "This decision was made to ensure that Airship Syndicate can continue to operate and deliver great experiences," a rep tells me. It's not often you see execs taking pay cuts.
— Nicole Carpenter (@sweetpotatoes) January 31, 2024
In many of those cases, hundreds to thousands of employees have been let go, often with severance and limited benefits, but some of the biggest companies in the industry, like Microsoft and Riot Games did not make any moves to save jobs by cutting anything from executives.
Wayfinder has had a bit of a bumpy history, but it is a positive that the team will continue even under these difficult circumstances. The dev team recently released a new roadmap and is looking ahead into 2024 to give the community an idea of what they can look forward to. Previously published by Digital Extremes, Wayfinder’s ownership came under its developer’s ownership and they decided to self-publish. This led to layoffs at Warframe developer Digital Extremes, which was driven in part by the Canadian company’s decision to focus on in-house projects and close its publishing arm completely.
Since then, Wayfinder has gotten steady progress, although things have been somewhat scaled back. More recently, the team has overhauled a number of systems and features to reduce resource drain and increase stability across a number of supported machines and on console. While we don’t know just how these layoffs might impact the studio’s plans, it seems things could’ve been worse and the team has a chance to continue that path forward.
