Star Citizen studio was \u201chighly toxic\u201d according to former Cloud Imperium Games producer Cloud Imperium GamesFormer producer for Cloud Imperium Games, Annie Bouffard, has spoken frankly about her experience working with the Star Citizen studio, alleging there is a \u201chighly toxic\u201d culture at the company. Layoffs have been a focus in the video game industry of late. Multiple companies have seen shrinking staff numbers already this year, including Blizzard and Unity. Staff losses at Star Citizen developer, Cloud Imperium Games, were originally attributed to the company\u2019s restructuring plans. It was assumed they occurred due to the studio\u2019s move to Manchester. However, comments made by former producer, Annie Bouffard, suggest there is more to the story than meets the eye. In a comment translated from French on LinkedIn, Bouffard described resigning from a \u201chighly toxic company\u201d. She also claims she was \u201cgaslighted\u201d after expressing \u201cconcern about potential layoffs,\u201d in the wake of the Manchester move. \u201cAt the end of January, a mass layoff, disguised as a \u2018relocation of staff\u2019 (when very few were able\/willing to move to other countries\/continents with little or no notice) occurred,\u201d Bouffard writes. She also discussed her treatment at an evaluation in November last year. According to Bouffard, despite being told she was meeting all her required objectives, the superior conducting the evaluation spent an hour nitpicking her character, and \u201cmocked her in a condescending way\u201d. While Bouffard is the only former staff member to take aim at CIG\u2019s workplace culture, the studio did lose a slew of long-term employees recently. Lead producer Jake Ross also posted about leaving CIG due to the restructuring on LinkedIn, as well as a lead designer, Dane Kubicka, previously based out of the company\u2019s Austin office. Other employees from the Austin office\u2019s QA team also seem to have been part of the layoffs. Reports of these layoffs also arrive after the news Star Citizen\u2019s live game director, Todd Papy, left the company after nine years. It\u2019s worth noting when a former employee spoke about being affected by layoffs at the company last year, CIG were quick to deny the claims.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Star Citizen studio was \u201chighly toxic\u201d according to former Cloud Imperium Games producer Cloud Imperium GamesFormer producer for Cloud Imperium Games, Annie Bouffard, has spoken frankly about her experience working with the Star Citizen studio, alleging there is a \u201chighly toxic\u201d culture at the company. Layoffs have been a focus in the video game industry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80925\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}