An artist working for troubled developer Factor 5 has alleged in a blog post that the company has not paid its staff for a month, has cancelled a key project and is now making layoffs. The blog post has since been deleted.
Factor 5 artist Sam Baker claimed that the studio is going through difficult “financial issues”, leading to a number of changes at the company. “I find out no one at Factor 5 had been paid in a month.... and we weren't going to any time soon,” he says, adding that “if we left, there would have been no hope in F5 staying afloat.”
“Then we lost health care. Ok, who needs it? If we're going to eventually be paid, some sacrifices would be worth it. I had my own on the side, so I wasn't sweating it. Then things turned bad...”
Baker went on to claim that a project he had been working for eight months has now been cancelled, and that “the president of the company basically told us that if we didn't receive funding in 1 week, all of us should move on and look elsewhere for another job… I have 1 more week left at Factor 5.”
In a dramatic reversal, Sam Baker had suddenly deleted the article in question, as well as his entire blog archive, following news reports covering the opinion piece. All content on the blog site, at the time of writing, has been replaced by a correction note:
“Steve Watts of 1UP wrote that I said Factor 5 cut one of their main projects, a comic book superhero game, and that's incorrect. It was a big story in the news that we recently lost a publisher, Brash Entertainment, when they went out of business. This does not mean that we've stopped production on that game, or that it was ever even in trouble. The other projects currently under way at Factor 5 are doing great. We hadn't received payment because of the situation with Brash, which is why I said I needed to look elsewhere for work.”
The deletion has, of course, unintentionally put more of a spotlight on his previous claims, of which a cached version can still be read here.
The president of Factor 5, Julian Eggebrecht, was not identified by name throughout the blog post. The entire blog post in question remains unofficial and unconfirmed.
) wohl auch schuld dran das Ensemble Studios geschlossen wird ?
