developer Mountaintop Studios has confirmed the layoff of 13 employees, saying the move was necessary to ensure the long-term future of the game and its community.
"To make sure we're set up to support Spectre and its community for the long [[link]] term, we made the very difficult decision to reduce 13 full-time [[link]] roles at the studio," Mountaintop co-founder and CEO Nate Mitchell said in a statement first reported by Polygon's . "We can’t thank these team members enough for their hard work and dedication to Spectre these past few years."
A Mountaintop representative confirmed the statement in an email to PC Gamer. The representative added that following the layoffs, the studio has "more than 70 full-time folks working on making the game better with every update."
Spectre Divide, a free-to-play 3v3 tactical shooter where each player controls two characters, only launched a few weeks ago, on September 3. Staff writer and digital gunfight enthusiast Morgan Park , saying after a pre-release preview session that he "can't stop thinking about when I'll get to play it next." The actual launch hit a bit of a bump with some (which were , slightly, in short order), and along with the traditional launch-day server woes that helped spark a flood of negative reviews on that are still reflected in the "mixed" user rating.
On the other hand, Spectre Divide seems to be doing reasonably well for itself, [[link]] with consistently holding in the mid-thousands. That's not a runaway hit but it's something to start with, at least—the $40 Concord attracted so few players that it .
Unfortunately, these cuts are just the latest in a game industry decimation that's been underway since : On top of the Mountaintop layoffs, September has seen people put out of work at , , , , , , and . And there's still a week to go.