This is a story that began on 20 December 2024. Insider Gaming, a publication which apparently has sources inside Cloud Imperium Games, came out with a story about a shake-up in corporate leadership. I decided to pass up on the story until more information came out. Well, more information came out as the story interested more inquiring minds (okay, I'm very nosy!) than mine.
Here's the guts of the story according to Insider Gaming.
At the time of writing, Insider Gaming has heard of at least three executives with a combined experience of around 25 years at Cloud Imperium Games who have had their positions terminated. It’s said that announcements of their departures will be announced in due time.
In an internal announcement to employees, Chris Roberts said, To achieve this laser focus [of meeting the release of SQ42 and Star Citizen 1.0], it is more important than ever to ensure we have high-performing and efficient teams working throughout the company. In order to achieve this, I have had to make changes to the structure of our teams from the very top of the company and downwards to ensure we have the right people in the right roles, working in person as much as possible from our most critical year yet.”
When the story came out, a small Star Citizen YouTuber, Camural, noticed that Roger Godfrey, the lead producer of Cloud Imperium's Core Technology Group, issued a post announcing he left the company the day after CIG launched the preview version of Alpha 4.0.
Given that Godfrey does not appear under an NDA to not to talk about his departure from CIG, I don't think the vague references in the Insider Gaming story referred to the long time CIG employee, so I pushed the story to the side until more information became available.
Today
another Camural video popped up on my YouTube feed, this time about the departure of CIG's Chief Strategy Officer, Carl Jones. According to
LinkedIn, Jones was hired in 2014, before former Crytek developers were scooped up by CIG when Crytek experienced major financial problems in 2016. While Insider Gaming noted he had been removed from the corporate
About page sometime around 21 December, Jones didn't
announce his departure on LinkedIn until Monday.
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| Carl Jones departure announcement |
At this point I decided to do a little snooping around and found that Dr. Martin Franz had resigned as the corporate secretary for Cloud Imperium Games on 7 January. The move is a bit unexpected as Franz is the General Consul for Cloud Imperium. He
took over the job from Ortwin Freyermuth at the beginning of June 2023 and according to his LinkedIn page was CIG's general European consul from 2017 to 2023. Submissions to
UK Companies House indicate Franz was appointed the corporate secretary to replace Freyermuth in that role in December 2023.
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From UK Companies House
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Among the duties of a corporate secretary is ensuring that the company complies with legal requirements by filing annual returns at Companies House. These returns include financial statements, directors’ reports, and auditors’ reports. As of the writing of this post, those returns were still not posted to Companies House for 2023, which throws a wrinkle into the whole matter I was not expecting.
As of the writing of this post, Franz still serves as Cloud Imperium's top legal officer.
Looking back to the beginning of Q4 2024 I saw two other people removed from the corporate About page between 4 October and 4 December, both working out of the Los Angeles office. The first was
Francesca McKibben, the vice-president of human resources in the U.S. Her departure seems normal as she left CIG in October to begin working as the Senior People & Culture Business Partner for LinkedTree in November, also in Los Angeles. One remarkable fact is McKibben had worked for over 10 years at CIG, beginning as the human resource manager from April 2014 to November 2015 who established the HR department at CIG.
The second person from the Los Angels office is a little more interesting. Eric Kieron Davis is the Chief People Officer for Cloud Imperium. According to
Davis' LinkedIn page, the position oversees all people functions and studio operations. Davis joined CIG in April 2015 after working for Blizzard Entertainment for 8 years. Perhaps more importantly to this story is that while Davis was removed from the About page 1-3 months ago, his LinkedIn page still lists him as working for Cloud Imperium. Sort of like how Carl Jones didn't make any announcement of leaving the company until Monday.
If we discuss all the faces that left (or are possibly leaving) CIG, we do need to cover the one new face on the About page: Claire Buffet. With as much press as Turbulent co-founders Benoit Beausejour and Marc Beaudet have received since CIG acquired the company in 2023, I'm a little surprised Buffet hasn't received a little more attention. A
16-year veteran of Turbulent, she became a partner at the company in January 2013 and the company's vice president of strategy and creation in November 2019. Currently she is Cloud Imperium's vice president in charge of Canadian operations.
At this point a little speculation is in order. If a restructuring is truly underway, I would foresee Claire Buffet moving up from VP of Canadian Operations to VP of North American Operations, with the Montreal, Toronto, and Austin studios falling under her domain.
What about the Los Angeles facility? I could foresee the facility closing, with Chief Marketing Officer Elliot Chin and Vice President of US Finance Brian Stich moving from Los Angeles to Toronto. Also, Stich would receive the title Vice President of North American Finance. Toronto seems a good compromise location as the two Americans could still live in the U.S. and commute into work from the Detroit suburbs if they wanted.
For now, that's all I have. But when I saw a video about the departure of a member of Cloud Imperium's C-Suite Tuesday morning, I didn't expect to write a thousand word post. Since I seem to know a lot about the subject already I'll keep an eye out for updates.
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