Starhawk Developer Lays Off 24 Employees, Refocuses to iOS

@Garfield518 said:

If you're changing your focus to iOS games, you might as well shut down.

iOS games make a lot of money, and are cheap to make. It's an efficiency play and smart if you wanna stay alive.

@Garfield518 said:

If you're changing your focus to iOS games, you might as well shut down.

Yup those little IOS games don't make a lot of money.....*sarcasm*

"Starhawk was the long rumored follow-up to Starhawk"

Well....that seems like a good idea to me?

I don't know if the response was lukewarm as much as there wasn't a response at all. Sony seems to be in the business of sending games to die in 2012. There was virtually no marketing push for this game, and a lot of people didn't know it had come out until weeks later. It's a shame. Lightbox seemed like an ambitious & capable group. They deserved better.

That's a shame. I had a lot of fun with Starhawk, and they were (still, maybe?) putting out a decent amount of map DLC, all for free.

If you're changing your focus to iOS games, you might as well shut down.

Rumblings of trouble at Austin-based Starhawk developer LightBox Interactive have been confirmed.

24 members of LightBox were told Friday would be their last day at the company, Lightbox president Dylan Jobe told me over email this evening. All 24 employees will receive a severance package.

“Layoffs suck,” he said, “but we're just shrinking our development team here at LightBox Interactive so we can be very nimble as we self-fund our next game and bring it to iOS devices.”

The first indications something was up at LightBox came via a traditional source for vague news statements: Twitter.

“And yeah, its time for another drink...” said Jobe.

Other members of Lightbox chimed in, suggesting a major change. These days, it’s easy to assume it’s layoffs.

Lightbox had signed a multi-year, multi-game publishing agreement with Sony, but that deal appears dead, perhaps related to the tepid response to Starhawk. Lightbox was forged from the ashes of Incognito Entertainment, which was responsible for Twisted Metal Black and War of the Monsters. Both of those were excellent, by the way.