The popular cryptocurrency game Gods Unchained’s devs were fired by the Australian firm Immutable.
Amidst a decline in cryptocurrency values, Immutable Games Studio is laying off a number of staff members, including one of its senior game designers.
On Immutable’s blockchain-based digital trading card game Gods Unchained, James Wakeham served as the lead designer. He recently claimed on Twitter that Wakeham is now seeking a new job after he “and a number of colleagues” were fired.
At a Monday all-hands meeting, the layoffs, which affected 6% of the company’s personnel, where disclosed.
Immutable boasted a valuation of $2.5 billion following its most recent funding round, in which it raised $200 million. Immutable X, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution created for games and NFTs and used by companies like TikTok and GameStop, who just launched an NFT marketplace, is the creation of this startup.
According to a CNET story, James Ferguson, the CEO and co-founder of Immutable, informed staff members that the firm is still in “a wonderful situation.”
In other places, Immutable has been clear that despite the recent layoffs, it has no intention of slowing down on recruiting new staff, particularly when it comes to working on Gods Unchained or its future action role-playing game Guild of Guardians, which is being developed by Stepico Games.
A representative from Immutable’s U.S. division told Kotaku Australia, “We are aggressively boosting hires across product, engineering, and tokenomics in Gods Unchained as we focus on scaling it to mainstream and beyond.”
The spokesman stated, “We have decided to carry out a little restructure inside Gods Unchained to assist better enable us to fulfill our aim of developing the next generation of web3 games.
According to the spokesman, Immutable now has 280 workers, up from 180 at the start of this year. And they said that the Australian business is “on pace” to hire 360 new workers in the upcoming five months.
Wakeham responded to a fan on Twitter who didn’t comprehend the company’s action and questioned Immutable’s financials by explaining why he was fired.
They have a fairly lengthy runway, according to Wakeham. They came to the conclusion that some of the game’s developers didn’t support the direction the project should go.
Immutable’s plan to downsize its workforce comes amid a wave of layoffs at cryptocurrency-related businesses.
The continuous “crypto winter” and the fact that the price of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets has fallen have both been used by some companies as justifications for laying off employees.
According to CoinMarketCap, the market valuation of the whole cryptocurrency industry peaked in November 2021 at $2.9 trillion but has since fallen to just over $1 trillion.
