Star Citizen studio Cloud Imperium has announced in its Chairman’s Club newsletter that it is officially shuttering its Los Angeles studio. Last year, the company told fans that it was laser-focused on releasing Star Citizen 1.0 and Squadron 42, and therefore it would be shrinking the LA office and moving it from active development to business support. (Apparently, the business support is no longer needed, as the whole studio is closing.) LA devs have apparently been undergoing layoffs ever since, as they were expected to move to either Austin, Montreal, or Manchester or be terminated in what was an obvious soft layoff. At some point, that mandate clearly shifted to eliminate some Montreal and Austin jobs as well, as multiple devs in those locations were also turned out of their jobs for refusing to relocate overseas as well.
One worker put it in plainer terms, characterizing the move as “a mass dismissal, disguised as a ‘relocation of staff’ (when very few could/wanted to move to other countries/continents with little or no notice).'” Affected by the ultimatum or layoffs were game director Todd Papy, who appears to have declined forced relocation to the UK, as well as a long list of top devs: Eric Kieron Davis, Jake Ross, Dan Trufin, Dane Kubicka, Vincent Sinatra, Andrew Rexroth, Annie Bouffard, and multiple others, including an eye-popping assortment of execs last Christmas. The whole situation was already prompting speculation about the permanent closure of the LA studio at the top of the year; now, it’s a reality.
Meanwhile, last week the European Union’s Consumer Protection Cooperation Network (CPC) issued some “coordinated enforcement” on video game monetization, specifically targeting breaches made by multiplayer horse game Star Stable and providing a series of principles for game devs to follow in order to ensure that they’re complying with EU laws. What does this have to do with Star Citizen? Because some followers of the project are arguing those principles are also being broken by CIG’s own sales and marketing tactics.
Portions of both the CPC’s goals and its principles paper are being singled out by Redditors who use these statements to claim that limited-time sales and focus on big-spending whales are also not following law and that that they can be used as a new avenue to refunds. However, it doesn’t really look like a clear-cut case: Time-limited sales that the CPC says “unduly influence children to purchase in-game virtual currency or in-game content” are the primary reason that Star Stable apparently violated EU consumer protections, as well as “a lack of clear and transparent information, adapted to children, about buying and using in-game virtual currency,” emphasis ours. That doesn’t really apply to Star Citizen.
The whaling section of the principles paper might hold more water, however, as it states that “video games that base their business model on targeting ‘whales’ are likely to target a vulnerable group of consumers” owing to the fact that “[c]onsumers that are willing to spend excessive amounts of money on and in a video game, so called ‘whales’, may be considered vulnerable since they are likely to struggle with impulse control or gambling disorders.” Granted, these are little more than guidelines provided to the games industry in order to make sure monetization designs fall within legal parameters, but it’s most certainly not stopping the conversations among certain followers of SC.
