Given its impressive launch, you’d think that Elite: Dangerous development team Frontier Developments would be fairly well protected from potential layoffs.
Apparently that’s not the case. According to an investor report, fifteen members of staff have been laid off at the company’s Halifax studio.
This will apparently help the company refocus work at its Cambridge offices, where it’s working on both more content for Elite and a new theme park sim, Coaster Park Tycoon, set for release in 2016. Frontier has been handling development duties on the venerable RollerCoaster Tycoon series since 2003, but the new game will be a self-published franchise rather than a partnership with Atari. Aside from that, details are rather thin on the ground.
“Development roles are being moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Cambridge, and the overall staffing mix will be changed to match the needs of these two projects,” reads the statement from Frontier. “15 content creation roles have been made redundant in Cambridge (from 281 total headcount), while Frontier continues to recruit in areas such as game and technology programming, server and web front end development.”
Gamasutra claims that an anonymous source informed them that the Frontier Halifax studio is being closed down entirely. Frontier are yet to confirm or deny that.
