A studio lauded after its 2021 launch for its ambition and hefty team of prior Blizzard and Epic developers, Lightforge Games has announced that most of its staff will be let go at the end of the month.
According to an announcement post by the studio on its socials, the studio was "unable to secure the necessary funding to finish Project O.R.C.S.", its social TTRPG-inspired sandbox RPG. Lightforge will be "downsizing to a skeleton crew" and, meanwhile, "sunsetting" its official social channels and Discord server.
"We always knew this was an ambitious long-shot of a project, but we pursued it because of a shared passion in collaborative storytelling and with a fearlessness to do something different both as a project and as a studio," CEO Matt Schembari explained on a LinkedIn post.
The studio announced Project ORCS upon its launch, inspired by both TTRPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons and social games such as Minecraft and Roblox, per interviews at the time. It raised $15 million back in 2022 to keep development going, with some major names such as NetEase, co-founders of Oculus and Twitch, and even Imane ‘Pokimane’ Anys. One preview showed essentially what's a free-form Dungeons & Dragons scenario creator, leading players through custom scenarios where permission doesn't need to be asked to test the "Guide's" preparation and schticks.
As awful as this closure sounds, those following the games industry lately may hardly need a reminder that this is just one of many frustrating closures and layoff moments in the games (and tech) industry.
It's gotten to the point where there's a literal Wikipedia page about this. Plus, one independently-kept tracker estimates this year's layoffs alone as about 9500, plus 10,500 in 2023 and 8,500 in 2022, the year that the major tech industry layoffs started.
There can't be this many job openings out there.
