Earlier this year, Phoenix Labs, the development team behind Fae Farm and Dauntless, was hit with heavy layoffs, affecting approximately 100 workers and canceling all games in development. The news was confirmed via a post on LinkedIn, which stated that the team would be reorganizing and that these layoffs were an unfortunate result of that restructuring. Today, thanks to a report by Josh’s Gaming Garden, we learned a little bit more about one of the games canceled, Everhaven.
Everhaven, known internally as Project Dragon, was set to be a cozy survival crafting RPG that allowed players to explore, build, and customize a magical world filled with a bevy of colorful biomes and creatures that could be interacted with. The team at Phoenix Labs worked on the game for about 4 years and, according to one former developer, it was only a few months from launch.
“After years of work put into it, the team was very close to the finish line.
The game was set to be revealed during one of the PC-centric showcases that coincide with Summer Games Fest and was going to launch in early access a few months after that.”
They went on to describe how Forte (the crypto VC firm that owns Phoenix Labs) was looking to divest itself from all in/development projects, but that Project Dragon devs were in the process of shopping the game around to a couple dozen publishers and investors. Forte then cut the timeline short and laid the team off shortly thereafter. “There were some efforts made after that to continue shopping the game around, but as I understand it, Forte squashed that as well.”
Outside of a petition to bring the game back, it doesn’t look like Everhaven is ever going to see a release. As more information continues to pour out regarding this and other games affected by the Phoenix Labs layoffs, we will be sure to keep you posted.
In the meantime, you can read about more layoffs affecting Humble Games.
