NCsoft Cancels Spacetime’s Sci-fi MMORPG

After two years of development, Spacetime Studios has announced that NCsoft has cancelled their upcoming sci-fi MMORPG and that a dozen people were laid off as a result.

We know it’s not the norm but at Spacetime Studios we’ve always been about communicating when we can. For two years this has been in good times but we want to put out a message to the community before the rumors start.

Our project has been cancelled by the current publisher. Regardless of how you look at it, we won’t be entering production in the immediate future, so we are retrenching and unfortunately had to let 12 folks go. There are always wild rumors at a time like this so we wanted to be as specific as possible to the number and circumstance. All 12 employees released were given extended benefits, severance and will be supplied letters of recommendation. These were good folks and we are not happy about it. We’ll do anything we can to help them land somewhere else. If you are a developer and are looking for good folks, drop us a line at jobs@spacetimestudios.com.

The cancelled game was our primary project and we have a complete MMO engine w/ networking infrastructure, tools suite, and next-gen rendering engine. The company remains extremely committed to the IP and once all mutual obligations have been completed between the publisher and ourselves we intend to explore every possible avenue to see that our team’s collective vision come to fruition.

We want to stress that there are no bad feelings with NCSoft. There is a tremendous amount of mutual respect between our companies. They have conducted themselves with honor and integrity, and we would work with them again in an instant.

We are still here, stable and strong, and running a little bit lighter while we figure out our next move. What does not kill us makes us stronger said the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. That may be true, but it isn’t pleasant. Wish us luck and good fortune.

Could this be because Tabula Rasa’s sales figures weren’t as good as the publisher expected?