Star Citizen's studio sacks several higher-ups to wrap up a year of quiet layoffs

Several Star Citizen’s developers and executives alike have been let go from the company over the last couple of months, according to Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson. Henderson, a known and reliable insider has learned of several releases from an anonymous source, and it’s more than just the game development staff as well.

Star Citizen has been in development for about 12 years now, and there’s a lot of debate on whether it's worth playing in 2024. It continues to see new updates and ships, but at the same time, several employees were laid off at the hands of Cloud Imperium Games over the last month or two.

Note: Parts of this article are based on the author's opinon. Moreover, the information herein is based on a third party.

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Employees and executives alike have been let go at Star Citizen’s parent company, Cloud Imperium Games

Per Tom Henderson’s sources, at least three high-level executives at Star Citizen’s Cloud Imperium Games have been let go, and their departures will be revealed at a later time. According to an internal memo, the purpose of these firings is to make sure they are hitting the releases for Squadron 42 and Star Citizen 1.0

Interestingly, this comes just a month after Cloud Imperium Games reportedly fired quite a bit of their staff, particularly the QA department. While reports say it was only about a dozen members of the team, which is about 1% of the workforce, that’s still a significant number of game developers let go.

Earlier in the year, about 100 staff members were let go at the Austin and LA offices, who also had to sign NDAs about the process so they couldn’t talk about being let go. What doesn’t add up about the news of executives and developers being fired is...how does this help game development?

According to the memo, it was said that the studio wants to “make changes to the structure of our teams from the very top of the company and downwards to ensure we have the right people in the right roles,” but removing QA development members doesn’t sound like it’s going to make the game easier to release.

If nothing else, the ship designs in Star Citizen are fantastic (Image via Cloud Imperium Games)

There are some fears within the company, according to Tom Henderson, that feel it’s a cost-saving measure, instead of something that will ultimately help with deadlines or launches, and that sounds like it makes far more sense.

In truth, we have no real idea what's going on. This is a third-party account collected from Insider Gaming's anonymous informants. It could be anything from cutting their losses and internal strife to investor politicking and a restructuring effort to bring new management, for the good of the game.

I’ve covered Star Citizen on and off across my 12+ years in games journalism, and the game still hasn’t launched. It’s had over $700M in investments from gamers and doesn’t really appear to be anywhere close to a launch date.

The game feels like all it does is create new ships for players to buy, and broken promises. There’s really no telling when, or if the game will ever really hit that 1.0 launch, much less, if all the promised features will be there.

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It’s always unfortunate to hear about firings in the game development space, but these certainly don’t appear to do anything to help the state that Star Citizen is in - and may only serve to harm it in the long run.