Red Fly Studio layoffs result of canned Star Wars title, resume suggests

by Christopher Grant on Jul 20th 2011 10:55AM

After laying off 30 developers, Red Fly Studio CEO Dan Borth told GameSpot, "The reduction of staff was a response to a large high-profile project that was, to our surprise, reevaluated and then canceled." While the identity of that project wasn't known at the time, a resume uncovered by internet uncoverer Superannuation points to development of a "next-gen Star Wars title."

Patrick Doran's LinkedIn profile includes Red Fly Studio under "past" experiences, where the artist worked from April 2008 to this month, as both an artist and environment artist. In addition to work on games like Mushroom Men, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 for Wii, and Thor for both Wii and 3DS, Doran worked as an environment artist from January of this year through June on the aforementioned "next-gen Star Wars title."

With a list of shipped games exclusive to Nintendo's consoles, it's not clear what "next-gen" means in this case. The studio's first HD game for Xbox 360 and/or PlayStation 3 using the high-profile Star Wars license? We've reached out to both Red Fly Studio and LucasArts for comment on the project.

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[Multi] Split/Second Developer Black Rock Faces Lay-offs; Sequel Canned

[Multi] Split/Second Developer Black Rock Faces Lay-offs; Sequel Canned

Black Rock Studio, the developer behind last year's solid racing title Split/Second, will be losing around 40 employees as a result of redundancies according to an anonymous source at the Disney Interactive Studios subsidiary.

The source told Eurogamer that half of the studio's staff have had nothing to do since December because all of their game concepts have been rejected by Disney Interactive: "It seems Disney have been unable to provide us with a project to work on, and our concept pitches clearly haven't gone down well (despite there being many of them)." Such concepts included a sequel to quad-based racer Pure, as well as a sequel to Split/Second, amongst others.

It's not all bad news though: "The inactive portion of the studio has been expecting redundancies for months, so this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's sad that it's come to this of course, but for many people they'll be quite happy to take the money and go, as they've been sitting around doing nothing for months," said the source. He also stated that the rest of the studio's staff have actively been working on a project that is "new and risky, so I imagine [Disney] don't want to risk putting two teams on it."

Split/Second gained impressive reviews last year, currently sporting a Metacritic rating of 84, and sold about 900,000 copies on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Written by: Mike Glubish

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