By Zen, PANews

A few days ago, ATMTA, the development company of Star Atlas, the Solana ecological 3A chain game, announced a significant layoff, including full-time employees and contractors of the cooperative studio invited to jointly develop the game. up to 73%.

Michael Wagner, ATMTA's co-founder and CEO, said they reassessed their budget and development needs to ensure their infrastructure could be maintained, and said that ultimately it was a process of "identifying key personnel who will enable us to Realize our long-term vision and still build out the various product lines we are developing."

However, Wagner also acknowledged that the reduced team size may affect game development. After this layoff, the joint development activities of ATMTA and partner studios will be greatly reduced, and its flagship product line Unreal Engine team will undoubtedly be the most affected. Considering that according to ATMTA's original plan, the full version of the Star Atlas game will take 4 to 6 years to launch, this large-scale layoff may prolong the development cycle, or even worse.

Born in a bull market and widely favored, lost half of the funds in FTX

Due to the long development cycle of 3A games, which usually takes at least 3 to 5 years, and consumes huge funds and resources, it often happens that the development team suspends the project and disbands the relevant teams to stop losses in time. For example, at the end of last year, the domestic game giant Mihayou disbanded the 3A game Project SH, which was also developed with Unreal Engine. This is a shooting game that focuses on the open world of the second dimension. It was first publicly established in 2019. The founder of MiHoYo and the producer of "Yuan Shen" personally led the team, but it was forced to terminate because the progress of the project did not meet expectations. The disbandment also failed to reveal too much information to the public.

Star Atlas was able to attract widespread attention at the earliest. In addition to the cosmic theme matching the concept of the metaverse that had just become popular at the time, the exquisite trailer of the movie texture and the grand world view setting also made it stand out from the crowd of relatively rough chain games. Thanks to blockchain and NFT technology, Star Atlas was able to raise funds through token and NFT sales before the game was released. It currently launched a game-centric NFT trading market, Galactic Marketplace, and launched a web game based on Star Atlas, realizing the model of making money while developing.

As a project launched during the encryption bull market in 2020, Star Atlas obviously cannot be compared with the big players in the traditional game industry in terms of financial support and development technology. Capital, Animoca Brands, Alameda Research, Bixin Ventures, Tagus Capital, Megala Ventures, CryptoViet Ventures and other institutions have raised more than $10 million. In 2021, Star Atlas also received $1.5 million in the sale of the game token ATLAS and the governance token POLIS, both of which currently have a circulating market value of around $18 million. However, after the FTX thunderstorm in November last year, ATMTA, which had a large exposure to the trading platform, lost $16 million, accounting for about half of the company's funds. When FTX closed withdrawals, these funds became unusable. After that, ATMTA recovered a small part of the capital loss by selling the debt to some investment funds.

In the context of the long-term bear market, although ATMTA, which has been severely damaged on FTX, can still earn some income every month, the money they earn is no longer enough to cover the millions of dollars in monthly operating team expenses. And Wagner also claimed last year that this game will cost nearly 200 million US dollars on NFT alone, and its current volume is far from it. Regarding the layoffs and the follow-up development of Star Atlas, Wagner said a few days ago that ATMTA will focus on upcoming products that may attract Star Atlas and increase revenue, thus promoting its long-term goals.

The outside world has been arguing about Star Atlas's long-term operation method of drawing cakes for players. Chain game Illuvium co-founder Kieran Warwick questioned the sustainability of the project last year, tweeting that Star Atlas would "completely destroy the retail industry." Kieran Warwick compared Star Atlas to Star Citizen in the debate. Star Citizen is a non-blockchain game with a space-like theme that combines combat games, world building, and business to show gamers pilots traveling through the universe in an extremely realistic and never-before-seen way The sensory experience of combat. Star Citizen has raised a total of $500 million in crowdfunding as of last year, and it has a large-scale development team. After more than ten years of development, the game is still in the alpha stage. The single-player mode "Squadron 42" (Squadron 42) under development has also been delayed several times, from the fourth quarter of 2020 to the present.

will still stick to the Solana ecology

Right now, the dilemma Star Atlas is facing is a common phenomenon in the industry. The Solana blockchain itself, where the game is located, is also facing many challenges: many games and NFT projects have left this ecology, and some original Solana-exclusive blockchain games Start seeking to expand to other blockchains.

However, the close relationship between ATMTA and Solana has not wavered, Wagner said: "We have been and will continue to strongly support Solana and its innovations, and I sincerely believe that the work we are doing based on game logic on the chain This is only possible on a network like this." The F-KIT developed by ATMTA is a toolkit created to improve the efficiency of Solana game development. It connects players to the Solana blockchain quickly and easily from within Unreal Engine 5. It also provides developers with UI blueprints and visual coding capabilities to integrate with any Solana program.

While ATMTA is downsizing its staff, Wagner said the team is moving forward and plans to rebuild the Unreal Engine team in time. In other words, the long-term goals haven't changed, but the Star Atlas team is changing course amid tough crypto markets and financial setbacks. "We're not stopping Unreal Engine development," he said. "Nothing has changed in our vision. We've just reprioritized our work to focus on things that are more immediately repeatable, and we've leveraged that to grow our user base and generate more solid revenue."

"When we launched this product in January 2021, we didn't have a dollar; we only had a white paper and a dream." In the latest setback, Wagner wanted to reiterate that the company is moving forward, building the product, and retaining the A vision of Star Atlas brought to life.