Tony Hilliam, CEO of Brisbane-based developer Auran, has issued a statement regarding Auran’s closure earlier today.
In it, Hilliam confirms that all Auran staff were today let go, and that staff will be paid their entitlements, supporting our anonymous source.
He then goes on to reiterate the recent changes to Fury, including the Age of the Chosen content update and the new free-to-play mode, and his belief that the game will eventually become “successful”.
As you can see, this new statement stands in stark contrast to Hilliam’s comments from last week, where he reassured us that things were fine.
Hilliam also mentioned to Kotaku AU that ex-employees will be compensated under GEERS (General Employee Entitlement and Redundancy Scheme).
Full statement after the jump.
Auran: the facts
The Directors of Auran Developments, the company that employs all the Auran staff, have today called in a Voluntary Administrator (like Chapter 11 in the US). All the staff were dismissed today. Despite earlier reports, staff will be paid for all their work to date, their annual leave entitlements, redundancy payments and long service leave.
Whilst this is the end of Auran Developments, it is far from the end of FURY and Trainz.
Trainz is the world’s leading rail simulator and has a community of more than 250,000 registered users around the world. It is published in dozens of countries and there are many products in the market today. The bulk of the Trainz team will continue to work on current projects and these projects will be released next year.
With Fury, we built up a team to make a world beating game and sadly we have not reached our goals – yet. Our performance to date has meant we could no longer fund the 70 strong dev team. However, FURY: Age of the Chosen will be launched as planned Friday 8pm GMT. We have put together a small but committed team to continue developing FURY on an ongoing basis. This core team, as we announced last week, are a passionate group of people committed to making FURY a success. We will be releasing bug fixes, content and feature updates on a regular basis and in fact they will be more frequent with our new agile team.
I believe that once people hear about F:AotC and the new Free to Play business model, we’ll start building up the player numbers and revenues that will make the game successful.
I expect the naysayers will have different thoughts, but they haven’t played the new build…yet.
Leave a Reply