When a retail game from a noted PC developer launches and is then quickly found to be broken, who do you bring in to help fix things? In Stardock’s case, they hired a guy who made mods for Civilization.
It’s never good to hear about game studios laying off staff, and we’ve certainly had our share of that recently. But you especially don’t want to see it happen to a studio that single-handedly proved you don’t need invasive DRM to top sales charts.