Illuvium CEO says firm has gone ‘super lean’ to speed up development

Blockchain-based gaming firm Illuvium Labs cut roughly 40% of its workforce over the last two weeks in an effort to speed up its game development timelines. 

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Illuvium co-founder and CEO Kieran Warwick said the firm had been downsizing for the last two years as the bear market set in, dropping from a peak of 200 employees.

The latest cut has taken the staff number from 110 to 65. Warwick said none of the layoffs were developers, with most of the staff coming from “teams that work in more of an operational capacity,” such as marketing, operations, security and quality assurance. 

The QA work will now be given to the community, he said. 

Warwick says that while it’s a “somber moment” to see people go, the firm aims to be more efficient after becoming a bit “too corporate” and growing too fast, adding:

“When we were at our best was when we were super lean. We only had 50 to 60 people, and everyone was an expert; we’re now back to that lean, sort of super-organism that can really deliver stuff quickly.”

“In our first year, there wasn’t much management. There weren’t many layers. It was just getting in, 12- to 15-hour days and smashing out as much work as possible, which arguably saw us build more than at any other time in  Illuvium’s history,” he added. 

Illuvium is developing three blockchain games: Overworld, Illuvium Arena and Illuvium Zero, which all operate on the Ethereum blockchain. 

In its white paper, the project’s roadmap hasn’t been updated in over a year. However, the firm has been actively releasing patches for its games and announcing plans to evolve its game Illuvium Overworld into a massively multiplayer online game (MMO).

The firm also announced a partnership with AI agent protocol Virtuals in a bid to upgrade its in-game non-playable characters so they can adapt to quests, dialogue and challenges based on the player’s actions.

Warwick says the staff cuts will also help reduce the firm’s monthly burn rate from averaging around $950,000 down to $500,000, with plans to drop it even further by the end of March. 

Some of the staff have also opted to take pay reductions, while others have agreed to accept the ecosystem’s token (ILV) instead of regular USD, all of which has given the firm “24 months of runway.”

At this stage, Warwick doesn’t anticipate the staff reductions affecting game development as they work toward “getting all of our core games in a really good state” and scaling back up, but not to the same staff levels as before, as it works toward new initiatives. 

“We’re relaunching Arena, one of our core games, and over the next four to five months, we will be shipping a whole bunch of new features and getting all of our core games in a really good state,” he said. 

“Then we’re going to push the button to go pretty hard and do a whole bunch of integrations with some eSports tournaments.”

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