As Palia players continue to reel from last week’s news that Singularity 6 had laid off 35% of its team, the staff are continuing to organize on behalf of their fellow devs – and that’s given us an even clearer picture of the impact and the future of the game.
We’d already noticed that the names surfacing were fairly highly placed at the company, leading us to wonder whether only junior staff were left. Senior environment artist Luiza Tanaka, who does not appear to have been laid off, tweeted out a public list of workers affected and the roles they held. And it’s quite a lot of senior staff, including the marketing director, community lead, engineering director, QA manager, UI art lead, and even an HR manager, all in addition to many senior staff from multiple departments, again including engineering.
Signal boosting my amazing peers from S6 that were hit by the layoffs. We have some amazing talent and straight up wizards in this list https://t.co/thHv3wN8EU
I worked closely with with pretty much all of the artists on this list, I highly recommend them.— Luiza Tanaka 🌸 (@LuizaTanaka) April 8, 2024
We note only 41 names on the list; initial reporting from Palia crew had suggested 49, so we assume some are missing.
S6 tried to reassure us last week in its statement, saying that it was making the cutbacks for “long-term stability.” Though we had asked about impacts to the game, it did not directly address the future of the game beyond implying continuing support. Unfortunately, Palia’s notoriously oblique statements worked against confidence here.
If you want a speed-run through the reactions in the MMO genre right now, just head over to the MMORPG subreddit, which apparently just found out about the layoffs from last week and has opinions. For example, according to people there, the problems are down to not being an MMO, being too cozy, being boring, being time-gated, being grindy, having too many hacks, having monetization, having bugs, having investor shortsightedness, and lacking full support for multiplayer. Some of them also labor under the belief that this game was Kickstarted (it was not) for $30M (haha no), that the game launched (it did not; it’s in beta) and so layoffs are fine (they are not), that it’s a money laundering scheme (what?), that it was made for kids (definitely not), and that it’s “everything wrong with MMOs,” so I guess MMOs are finally all sorted now and everyone can go home. Phew!
