Fantasy Flight Interactive To Close; FFG RPG Staff Let Go

Fantasy Flight Interactive (FFI) is closing shop according to Timothy Gerritsen, Head of Studio, who posted the following on LinkedIn on January 6, 2020:

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It's with great sadness that I have to report that the decision has been made to close Fantasy Flight Interactive next month. I'm proud of the team and the game we've dedicated ourselves to for the past few years. It's a been an amazing journey with even more amazing people. I'm going to do my best to get my team placed in new positions. I have programmers, designers, artists, QA staff and a producer to get placed in new roles and will do my best to do so quickly. Additionally, I'm now open to new opportunities myself since I will also be out of a job.

FFI was an independent subsidiary within Asmodee Digital. To quote from its website: "Fantasy Flight Interactive was founded with a straightforward mission: Bring the depth of design and polish that defines Fantasy Flight Games to digital platforms... As part of the Asmodee family, we partner with designers and developers from Fantasy Flight Games to bring an immersive and engaging experience to fans around the world. We enjoy a unique position in the industry—with the resources and support of a veteran studio and the ambition and entrepreneurial spirit of an independent developer, we're bound only by imagination."

On top of this, the FFG role-playing department has apparently been let go. On Facebook, Tim Huckelbery — who has worked on a variety of FFG RPG titles including Dark Heresy, Genesys, Legend of the Five Rings, and the three Star Wars lines — wrote, "Yes, there were layoffs today at FFG. I won't go into numbers or names, but I was one of them. It was a good almost 9 years run (more if you count my freelancing time with them)."

In a post on the FFG forums, Ian Houlihan — who worked on the Legend of the Five Rings RPG on a freelance basis — describes the working process he experienced:

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We would receive a contract for one or more sections of a book, or an entire adventure. When it came to a book, we would share that with other writers. Once completed, the entire manuscript would be assembled by the FFG RPG Department including any additional in-house produced content. I know that there are freelance editors, and proofreaders as well who exists to support this machine. In other words, the freelancers produce the content, as do the developers.

The art department then create the layout of the book, but all has to go through final approval via the RPG Department.

In essence, the Developers could do all the work, but they outsourced to freelancers.