Star Atlas Core Team Faces Significant Downsizing as ATMTA Inc Implements Restructuring Plans, Laying Off 120 Builders

ATMTA, the blockchain gaming and metaverse development studio, today announced plans to restructure its team. The studio laid off more than 120 builders of Star Atlas, a metaverse space exploration blockchain game currently in development.

Star Atlas is a grand strategy game of space exploration, territorial conquest, and political domination, built on the Solana blockchain. In Jan 2022, Star Atlas announced that Animoca Brands had purchased over $3 million worth of Star Atlas NFT ships.

In a letter shared with the Star Atlas community on Discord, Star Atlas CEO & co-founder Michael Wagner announced that ATMTA had to make a “hard decision” to let go of the builders of Star Atlas. 

This is not the company’s first restructuring. ATMTA downsized its team from a peak of 235 in late 2022 to 167 after suffering a blow from the collapse of FTX. After the latest restructuring, only 45 employees will remain in the Star Atlas core team. 

Wagner said that the remaining team members will focus on delivering the upcoming SAGE browser game and the newly announced Crew Mobile App. The CORE graphic novel will also continue to be released. The team is also preparing to launch Star Atlas’ DAC (Decentralised Autonomous Corporation) platform, which will host guilds and clans of the game.

Development of the Unreal Engine 5 Star Atlas game will continue, albeit at a slower pace, and future releases will still be produced. The company said the downsizing would provide a longer runway for uninterrupted development and multiple product launches while making Star Atlas more attractive to VCs. 

“We also believe that with a smaller footprint, more focused approach, and greatly reduced burn rate, we will be able to more readily attract capital investments that may enable us to ramp up production on more product lines,” Wagner wrote in a letter to the Star Atlas community.

In a tweet, gaming YouTuber cagyjan encouraged VCs to “take the leap of faith” in Star Atlas to “make a massive AAA game with a truly full-on chain economy happen.” 

🚨BREAKING : @staratlas has gone through a major restructuring.

From 167 employees to 45 employees to keep the project going.

Personal note: I encourage VCs to take the leap of faith in Star Atlas. For a game to inspire a community the way Star Atlas has inspired, it’s going… pic.twitter.com/iZ671db3JK

— cagy (@cagyjan1) July 25, 2023

Of the restructuring, Illuvium executive producer Andrew Wall said:

“Unfortunately, this may be the death knell for Solana at least in the gaming space… It propped the gaming metaverse side of Solana on the success of Star Atlas… Everyone in Solana leadership was talking about how Star Atlas was the future of gaming in metaverse and bringing mass-volume NFT usage in our ecosystem. Obviously no, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

Wall added that there were “a lot of very bearish things” he thought when he saw the restructuring announcement. He noted that Star Atlas couldn’t raise money while many other blockchain games were successfully raising funds. He also believes that the web3 space is seeing the downward trajectory of the dotcom bust for the metaverse.

Financial troubles for ATMTA and Star Atlas surfaced in April when it was discovered that the company sold $1.6 million worth of the in-game currency ATLAS and the POLIS governance token over a three-month period. The company-owned tokens were sold for reasons unknown. 

Krigs, the founder and chief editor of Star Atlas news platform, The Hologram, reported that positive-leaning Star Atlas community members speculated that the token sales were ATMTA’s attempt to increase its development runway through the year while others believed that something “more nefarious” was happening.