Quantic Dream announced on May 20 that its first new game in eight years would be abandoned just three months after launch. Spellcasters Chronicles, a free-to-play MOBA, has already been removed from Steam with servers set to go offline in June. But the project flopping so quickly will also lead to potential deep cuts within the Detroit: Become Human studio. Up to 95 employees could be laid off, and a French union is blaming management for the failure, including director David Cage.
“This project, started 8 years ago and led by Guillaume de Fondaumière, David Cage and Grégorie Diaconu, was supposed to be a ‘reasonably-sized’ project and was planned for a much earlier release,” Le Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo wrote in a new blog post. “Over all these years, nobody questioned the business model or how the game was to become profitable. Catastrophic project management resulted in iteration after iteration, exhausting the team and leading production straight to disaster.”
It continued, “Quantic Dream leadership points to external factors; we blame their decisions, be they financial, creative or organizational. The resulting project was ungodly expensive and aimed at a high-risk market, without matching current player demands.”
Quantic Dream said Star Wars Eclipse, its other game in development, would be unaffected by the restructuring, though employees are reportedly questioning who will get moved over from Spellcasters Chronicles to the upcoming narrative-based single-player adventure, and why more staff aren’t being kept on at the studio.
“Pretending that Spellcasters workers are unable to work on Star Wars Eclipse, and vice versa, is an insult to everyone working at Quantic Dream,” the blog post reads. “The company is basically saying : you are incapable of working on other video games and your skills are worthless. This is even worse when the company is developing its own proprietary tools, and where teams got split by project only recently.”
Members of STJV have also taken aim at NetEase, the Chinese conglomerate that acquired Quantic Dream in 2022, but recently retreated from many of its video game development ventures abroad. It’s insinuated that NetEase forced the early abandonment of Spellcasters Chronicles and rushed out the live service game with minimal marketing. “This is the beginning of a new chapter for Quantic Dream,” David Cage wrote when the game was announced last fall. That dream appears to have lasted less than eight months.
“Worker representatives have sounded the alarm about the project’s colossal risk level numerous times,” the union wrote. “In front of employees, management arrogantly explained that success was a given for Spellcasters Chronicles, thanks to ’30 years of experience’ of the decision-makers. In front of the workers’ council, management refused to consider other scenarios and to plan accordingly. Failure was never an option, never thought about, never planned for: incompetence led us here today. Workers pay for management’s misguided ways.”