According to various reports from developers who’ve worked there, and now from Ethan Gach, a writer at Kotaku, CD Project Red has laid off 29 developers from The Molasses Flood. The studio, which is a subsidiary based out of Boston, is currently working on the reboot of The Witcher spin-off IP known only as “Project Sirius” which was announced that they had reworked the title at the end of last week. Apparently, just one day after this, the layoffs began to take place, with the total of employees now at 21 from Molasses, and 8 from the company’s mainland Poland who were let go. Gach reports that CD Projekt Red confirmed this with Kotaku, making the layoffs official.

Update: CDPR confirms layoffs at Witcher spin-off studio Molasses Flood. Says 29 devs affected and calls it the result of the game’s reboot.

“Because the project changed, so has the composition of the team that’s working on it – mainly on The Molasses Flood’s side.” pic.twitter.com/F0HwPcIYrx

— AmericanTruckSongs9 (@ethangach) May 15, 2023

In a statement made to Kotaku, a spokesperson from CD Projekt Red says the layoffs took place due to the project being restarted and “finishing a new framework.” “Because the project changed, so has the composition of the team that’s working on it–mainly on The Molasses Flood’s side,” the spokesperson said. “The concrete number of employees we parted ways with is 21 team members in the US and eight in Poland (working on the project outside of the US).” We still don’t know anything about this supposed new framework and what that entails, but apparently, after this work was completed, CD Project Red essentially cleaned house on the development side.

As we already mentioned, several developers who were laid off or affected by this spoke out on social media about their situation. Project Sirius was initially announced back in October 2022, along with the company’s future plans with The Witcher franchise which includes The Witcher 4. Not much has been assessed on the project since that announcement, until just this month when they revealed information about the aforementioned framework. CD Project Red has not commented or mentioned anything further on the current state of Project Sirius, but these recent layoffs don’t exactly paint a positive situation. Hopefully, those 29 developers are able to land on their feet with a new studio/company soon.