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"This company has been driven into a wall for years" - Life is Strange studio Don't Nod faces unrest while teetering on insolvency

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"This company has been driven into a wall for years" - Life is Strange studio Don't Nod faces unrest while teetering on insolvency

There's deep unrest at French studio Don't Nod - creator of Life is Strange, Remember Me, Vampyr, Banishers: New Eden, and most recently Aphelion - as it scrambles to restructure itself and guard against insolvency.

Indeed, an impassioned account of proceedings on French union Le Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo's website (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun) reveals Don't Nod has entered safeguard proceedings - a kind of last-ditch restructuring effort to stave off insolvency. It also reports that even though redundancies are being made,Don't Nod intends to finish making the in-development game codenamed P14, albeit relying more on outsourced development rather than its cut-down in-house team.

The report, which claims knowledge of a memo sent by Don't Nod CEO Oskar Guilbert, and of the goings-on of the Don't Nod employee representatives - the CSE - doubts whether Don't Nod will be able to finish the game. Apparently all of the studio's character artists, concept artists, most of its environment artists, most of its sound designers, game designers, level designers, programmers, producers, testers, and dev-ops have been let go.

"To compensate for this massacre and keep on running with production on a game that, to this day, didn't cut down on its scope and is keeping around a hundred persons busy, management is betting it all on outsourcing," the report says.

"Managers, who are usually seen as more competent and experienced than non-managers, are kept within the organisation and studio management expects them to orchestrate the massive shift to outsourcing as well as take over the workload of the fired team members.


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