System Era Softworks, the developer of Astroneer, laid off more than 30 developers this week. This restructuring stems from Astroneer's Early Access launch underperforming expectations, with the project now set to continue under a smaller team.
In its announcement, the studio apologized to affected employees and stated that the company has always believed games are made by people, and how employees are treated will be reflected in their work. Therefore, these layoffs contradict the principles the team aimed to uphold when founding the studio.
A studio communications lead later explained on Reddit that the team had invested significant resources into the project, but results did not unfold as planned. The company thus decided to downsize the project team and continue developing the official 1.0 release in a more sustainable manner aligned with the actual user base.
The game had a rough start in Early Access, with low initial player numbers and issues surrounding the cross-platform multiplayer release for the Nintendo Switch 2 version. System Era Softworks had previously committed to bringing the game to version 1.0; while these layoffs do not change that public goal, future updates, bug fixes, and full release development will now be handled by a smaller team.