Behind the sunless scenes
A year ago, Fallen London and Sunless Sea developer Failbetter Games successfully pitched Sunless Skies on Kickstarter. The upcoming project was funded in four hours and its crowdfunding campaign concluded with nearly 400 per cent of the money needed to smash its financial target. In September last year, Failbetter won a GamesIndustry.biz award for being one of the best employers in the UK video games industry. The team gave enthusiastic quotes to Eurogamer's sister site about the benefits of working at the tiny, tightknit outfit. Failbetter, seemingly, was on a high.
But last week the London-based studio surprised fans and Sunless Skies backers alike with the news it had delayed the game and would cut four staff - a quarter of that same, tiny studio. Those who had talked so positively of life at Failbetter just six months prior were among those headed out the door. Failbetter announced the delay and lay-offs via a blog post which blamed redundancies on a need to slim down its workforce and work on one Sunless Skies-shaped project at a time, a move it said was necessary to protect the future of the company. The news came out of the blue for Failbetter fans, but for staff at the studio, it came as no surprise.
Eurogamer was alerted to the upcoming layoffs and complaints of poor management at the studio several weeks ago, and over the past month I have spoken with around a dozen Failbetter staff, past and present, both before and after the company made its public announcement. These claims have found voice in Failbetter's former boss Alexis Kennedy, who left the company in 2016 but has remained close to the team he founded, and a number of others who have chosen to speak out but wished to remain anonymous for the sake of their careers. These complaints have also, it is equally worth noting, been broadly denied by the studio's board and the majority of other Failbetter staff continuing at the studio.
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