Quantic Dream leadership has just announced an immediate stop to the development of Spellcasters Chronicles, along with a “restructuring” plan, resulting in mass layoffs. One quarter of the company’s workers are under threat: this adds up to 95 lost jobs.

Officially, the “unstable and difficult market” is being blamed for this decision – but it was hardly difficult to predict. 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. 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. Quantic Dream leadership points to external factors; we blame their decisions, be they financial, creative or organisational. The resulting project was ungodly expensive and aimed at a high-risk market, without matching current player demands.

It’s sad to say, nobody is surprised by this outcome. Worker representatives have sounded the alarm about the project’s colossal risk level numerous times. 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.

May the Spellcasters be with us

NetEase, being the sole shareholder of Quantic Dream, is just as much to blame. They pushed to stop Spellcasters’ development as soon as possible and no effort was made to publicize its release, leaving it to its fate. How can one hope to find players when they aren’t even aware our game exists?

We bitterly regret that these layoffs are not affecting decision-makers at Quantic Dream and NetEase, but instead workers who see years of labor reduced to nothing. To make it all even more unfair, workers are not credited in the game’s Early Access version, released late February, as if all those years were worthless. For some people, this results in the totality of their careers being impossible to prove.

Management is trying to cut the entirety of the Spellcasters Chronicles team, and pretends that this team’s skills have no link at all with those of the Star Wars Eclipse team – even after training. This is an obvious lie, and shows how little the management understands how layoffs work in France, recalling the inanity of Don’t Nod’s layoffs plan in 2024. 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 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. Contempt, incompetence from the heads of Quantic Dream, or both ?

Today throws an entire company, one of the main employers in the French videogame industry, into turmoil. The same causes lead to the same problems: Star Wars Eclipse entered production at the same time as Spellcasters, with the same directors, and its development is proving just as complicated. They would certainly appreciate reinforcements from the Spellcasters teams.

Keep all jobs: it’s not wizardry

Rather than reduce production bandwidth and deprive the company of invaluable skills, we wish to safeguard the future of Quantic Dream, its projects and its workers.

We demand:

That all planned terminations be canceled;
In the absence of a new project, that the Spellcasters teams be reassigned to the production of Star Wars Eclipse;
For all workers to be re-categorized at a higher professional rank as is their due, to bolster their rights and employment protections against these constant threats;
That management and creative directors, solely responsible for this failure, resign immediately.

So that our work may live on a bit longer, we had hoped to invite players worldwide to join us in playing the game one last time in solidarity before the shutdown, but to add insult to injury, the game has already been removed from Steam.

We give our full support to our comrades at Quantic Dream who are now living in uncertainty due to this brutal, unfair state of affairs. Our lives are not a release valve and we demand a stable situation for all workers.

We of course give our full support to our comrades at Quantic Dream Montréal who are under the same wretched conditions, but who are being hit even harder due to less protective labor laws.

Finally, we also give our support to our comrades suffering the same indignity in all Nacon studios and elsewhere. These scenarios repeat again and again across many studios, but rest assured: we won’t go out without a fight.