UPDATED: Digital Extremes Lays Off Staff And Will Turn Control Of Wayfinder Over To Airship Syndicate

Unfortunately, we have more layoffs to report today, as Polygon is reporting that Digital Extremes has laid off at least 20 people today. The layoffs impact external projects such as Wayfinder, which obviously hasn't had the greatest of early access launches so far.

Alongside the layoffs, it is being reported (via PC Gamer) that Digital Extremes will cease support for Wayfinder, giving full ownership of the title over to developer Airship Syndicate. 

“We can confirm we have made the difficult decision to cease operations of our external projects division,” a Digital Extremes representative told Polygon. “We have had to say goodbye to a number of hardworking and highly valuable team members as a result.”

Meanwhile, Airship Syndicate announced in the Wayfinder Wednesday blog post that they have increased XP gains across the board in Wayfinder. Enemy kill XP was increased by a whopping 386%, Expedition completion bonuses were increased by 237%, and Reward Tower XP increased by 325%.

Those are some significant XP increases for Wayfinder based on player feedback. Wayfinder continues to struggle retaining players on Steam with today's Steam Charts showing just over 800 players. Obviously this doesn't include PlayStation players, but those probably aren't the numbers Airship Syndicate or Digital Extremes were looking for and it probably doesn't help that Wayfinder access still requires at least a $19.99 purchase right now. Free-to-play is slated for official launch.

We've reached out to Airship Syndicate for a comment from their point of view and will update this piece should we receive a comment.

We did receive the following from Digital Extremes whish reiterates their previous public statements:

On External Projects: “We can confirm we have made the difficult decision to cease operations of our external projects division. We have had to say goodbye to a number of hardworking and highly valuable team members as a result.”

On Wayfinder: “We're working with Airship to transition full control of Wayfinder to them in coming months.” 

UPDATE: While Airship Syndicate took to their Discord to say that Wayfinder will continue to move forward and has a long way to get to launch, but that they will get there with help from their community, Digital Extremes posted on their LinkedIn that the layoff count was over 30 and that the company believes that to achieve success with Warframe and eventually Soulframe, it needs to turn its attention 100% to in-house project.