The gamble that Hi-Rez Studios and Titan Forge made to abandon future content additions for Smite and to wholly commit to Smite 2 has not paid off yet. A recent slate of changes and decisions has seen the publisher face all manner of issues, so much so that recently it ended production on a handful of other games, closed down their respective studios and teams, and diverted all attention to making the at-the-time rough Smite 2 the game that was promised originally.
This choice led to many developers being laid off recently, as fans struggle between continuing to play the long-running original Smite, which now has no future, and transitioning to the sequel where they have to effectively start from scratch. Clearly this choice wasn’t as black-and-white as Hi-Rez was expecting, as now even more layoffs have hit the studio.
As was confirmed by executive producer Alex Cantatore in a post on Reddit, it’s noted that many of the executives at the studio have been laid off, and that now he is leading the development team at Titan Forge.
“Unfortunately, there were a handful of layoffs in senior management positions only last Thursday.
“[Former president Stewart Chisholm] is transitioning away from Hi-Rez as part of this. [Ex-exutive producer Travis Brown] and [senior staffer “Radar”] were also affected, as well as two folks in senior management on the Rally Here side of the business. I am very sad to be losing all of them.
“Essentially, the board’s rationale was that the company had a lot of senior management in relation to our current size.
“This does not affect our core mission, or any other people working directly on SMITE 2. We will continue to focus our efforts on improving the core game and new player experience, while adding more Gods at our current one-per-two-weeks pace.
“I will now be leading Titan Forge, and I will miss Travis and Radar dearly.
“I made the call to not make a big statement about this. Perhaps not the right call as the news was somewhat bound to leak, but I felt like Travis, Radar, or Stew should be allowed to make their own statement if they chose to given the fact that so few people were affected.”
It’s unclear what this means for the future of Hi-Rez Studios, Titan Forge, and Smite 2, but this is now the second round of layoffs affecting the team in as little as three months, on top of seeing one of its most-decorated and veteran developers leaving relatively recently.
