Lightforge Games halts social RPG production, downsizes to a skeleton crew

Over the past few years we’ve been reporting on Lightforge Games, a development studio that entered our general genre radar for snapping up former Blizzard devs including artist Glenn Rane, entering a partnership with Mike Morhaime’s Dreamhaven studio, and raising $15M in investor funds, all to develop what was described as a social RPG with open creativity and a TTRPG feel.

As good as that might have all sounded on paper, the execution of the project has apparently fallen flat, as Lightforge announced that project development is being paused and its staff is being reduced to a mere skeleton crew following the studio’s failure to secure additional funding for the game, codenamed Project ORCS.

LFG co-founder and CEO Matt Schembari offered some additional context, saying that “the remaining skeleton team will regroup to see what a viable future for the studio may be” and stumping for the developers who have since been handed their pink slips. In both cases, the number of affected workers was not divulged.

“While today is a sad day for Lightforge, I’m very proud of the work we’ve done and the team we’ve built over the past four years,” Schembari writes. “For now I’m going to hold on any retrospectives or lessons learned while we get through the process over the next few weeks and regroup to find a viable future for the studio.”

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