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| Image taken from Reddit |
In a newsletter to members of The Chairman's Club (customers who have purchased $1000 or more in goods from CIG's cash shop), CIG is closing the Los Angeles office in order to "make sure our developers are right where they need to be for the final stretch, which means moving key staff to be closer to their teams and counterparts in other studios."
The closing of the Los Angeles office was first officially broached by Chris Roberts in his response to the news of layoffs at Cloud Imperium at the beginning of 2024. However, at the time Roberts only referred to development staff. In a Letter from the Chairman published in March 2024 Roberts informed the world about plans for the Los Angeles office.
As part of this development re-organization, we have made a few significant changes. From a personal standpoint I have moved to Austin, Texas from Los Angeles to be closer in time zone to our main development operations in Manchester, Frankfurt, and Montreal. I am spending significant time at our largest studio in Manchester with almost 600 staff, as I sit with Rich and the teams, working towards completion on Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. As part of this, we made the difficult decision to ask the Los Angeles development team, which had increasingly been providing support for the main development teams based in Manchester, to relocate to join other teams, primarily in Manchester, but also in Austin and Montreal. Los Angeles, while shrinking, will still be an important office for the company, but one focusing on a business support role with Marketing, Finance, Legal and HR.
By January the information that the Los Angeles office would remain important began to appear optimistic. Two key HR leaders based out of the L.A. office were quietly removed from the About page on CIG's corporate website. In October 2024 Francesca McKibben, the vice-president of human resources in the U.S., left the company, moving over to LinkedTree. Sometime between the beginning of October and beginning of December Eric Kieron Davis, formerly Cloud Imperium's Chief People Officer, was also removed. Since I first posted the news in January, Davis' LinkedIn page was either deleted or otherwise made inaccessible.
In February another Los Angeles-based member of Cloud Imperium's leadership team was removed from the About page. Chief Marketing Officer Elliot Chin is also no longer listed with no replacement listed on the CIG corporate website.
With both the global leaders of HR and Marketing based in Los Angeles departing their roles, the writing was on the wall for the office. While the information possibly only comes from Reddit, I'm going to go ahead and believe it. Hopefully my judgement is correct because I really hate writing retractions.
