“Majority” of Dauntless developers laid off two months after disastrous Steam launch wiped all player progress

The developers of free-to-play monster hunting game Dauntless have laid off “the majority of the studio” less than two months after the game’s troubled launch on Steam. “Today is another difficult day at Phoenix Labs,” said the company in a post on LinkedIn, which called the sweeping layoffs “part of unfortunate but necessary changes to our operations.” It’s the fourth time in two years that the studio has seen job cuts.

The studio has been owned by secretive blockchain company Forte since some time in 2023. Since that year Phoenix Labs have seen three other rounds of layoffs. The studio saw 140 job cuts in May last year, while 34 jobs were axed back in December 2023. Before that, the company cut loose 9 percent of their workers in May 2023.

Over the same period there has been growing player dissatisfaction with Dauntless, which was generally well received when it first arrived. Edwin called it “Monster Hunter for people who fear grind”. But recent player reviews complain that free-to-play business tactics have been increasingly interfering with basic design of the game. The game has been on PC and other platforms since 2019 but its arrival to Valve’s shopfront in December last year came with a big update called “Awakening”.

Alongside a bunch of changes, this update included the bizarre decision to essentially wipe every player’s character progression and weapon collections to zero. As you might expect, the game quickly attained an “overwhelmingly negative” review average on the store.

Shortly afterwards, this update was criticised by the studio’s former associate producer, Jessie Leigh Gagnon, who said it was no longer “free to slay” in complaints spotted by TechPowerUp.

“They’ve gutted the core gameplay and crafting mechanics,” she said in a post on LinkedIn. “The essence of the Slayers (who I named just over ten years ago), has been, in fact, slayed to ribbons. We never would have made decisions that are so blatantly not player focused.”

The developers soon apologised for the way the update was handled, and recognised player distaste for the progress wipe and other changes. They handed out in-game currency and XP as part of this apology, saying that they would work to make things better. “We recognize the need to rebuild trust and improve how we engage with our community,” they said. It’s hard to see how this might now happen – it’s possible even the person who wrote these words is now unemployed.

“We will share more details in the coming weeks,” say Phoenix Labs about the future of Dauntless (and the studio’s other game, Stardew-like farming simulator Fae Farm). But whatever they say it will be hard to take at face value, given that previous statements insisted the studio’s games would be “unaffected” by the periodic layoffs.

On top of these concerns, we also have to remmeber that behind Phoenix Labs there stands an inscrutable blockchain company in the shadows, smoking the world’s forests and typing decisions nobody can see into an iPhone. When Forte bought the studio, they reportedly instructed management at Phoenix Labs not to tell anybody that the blockchain group were the new owners. Which is, uh, I believe the business term is: fucked up.

Forte’s only other game studio during that time were the mobile game developers Rumble Games. They were shut down by the blockchain company in July last year.