Auran CEO Tony Hilliam has made a statement regarding the rumour that the company today planned to let a number of staff go, mainly in its QA department.
While Hilliam confirms that the Fury team will be reduced, it’s more to do with creating an “agile” group of developers better able to address the needs of the game. Contrary to what the original Angry Gamer story led many to believe, the company is not going bust:
As I explained to the staff yesterday, whilst FURY has started off slower than expected, I still see a bright and long future ahead. However, that future will not include the full 60 man development team who have worked on FURY for the past year. The future will focus on a smaller, more agile core team of Fury developers. These are people who are incredibly passionate about the game and work until 4 in the morning to ensure they get things done.
It’s actually fairly normal for a dev team to shrink after the release of a title. The difference here is that Auran is going to the trouble of finding ex-employees other opportunities instead of just casting them into the sea of joblessness.
The statement goes on to mention that Auran plans to outsource at least some of the content development for Fury to China, where it says it has had a lot of success already.
Finally, Hilliam says that Tantalus (who we’re stilling waiting to hear from) is right now opening a new studio near Auran’s base of operations up in Brisbane. The new studio, which will focus on Wii and DS titles, will employ a few ex-Auran folk.
Tony’s full statement can be found after the jump.
Several websites have circulated rumours regarding impending doom at Auran. Here is the official comment from Auran CEO, Tony Hilliam:
Auran has grown from 30 to 70 staff over the past few years, and in the past few months we’ve released FURY, Battlestar Galactica for XBLA and the 6th Edition of the long running Trainz franchise. In addition to game development, we also have a successful publishing business and release around 40 titles each year in Australia and New Zealand. In fact, we have just started licensing Australian-made titles to take to the world market.
Fury has been operating for 6 weeks and our first Free content update, the “Age of the Chosen” will definitely be released on December 14. Fury: AotC addresses many of the issues identified by players and reviewers in the original release. We’ve greatly enhanced the new player experience and made huge improvements to a number of systems. There will be another major FURY announcement next week about further changes that will be very exciting to all players (unless of course one of the staff under strict NDA decide to leak those details as well).
As I explained to the staff yesterday, whilst FURY has started off slower than expected, I still see a bright and long future ahead. However, that future will not include the full 60 man development team who have worked on FURY for the past year. The future will focus on a smaller, more agile core team of Fury developers. These are people who are incredibly passionate about the game and work until 4 in the morning to ensure they get things done.
FURY has been a big part of our lives and the core team will be doing everything they can to make sure it reaches its full potential. Anyone who has played a close game of Vortex or come back from 2-0 down to beat the opposing team in Elimination know of that potential. Sadly, too many players have only experienced a savage beating at the hands of veteran players. Perhaps they may pick up their bloodied corpses and return next weekend to see what we have done to help them get into the game.
Regarding China, during the past two years we successfully used several outsourcing companies and will be looking to China to create much of the new content that we will release in future updates. Furthermore, we’re talking with a number of publishers in Asia regarding co-development deals.
In addition, Auran and Tantalus are working together with a view to selecting a number of Auran staff to be part of new Tantalus studio (in Brisbane next to the Auran studio) working on DS and Wii titles. In fact, those interviews are taking place right now.
So the rumour mill got a number of things right or close to it, and I am happy to be able to add a little more detail. As they say in the classics, the death of Auran and FURY has been greatly exaggerated.
Tony Hilliam
CEO, Auran Games
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