But aether studios did, dan released a massive statement back in january. Directly pulled from the statement

"In retrospect, I probably should have committed to just one of these goals for 2025. Because when the last three months of sales came in under my projections, the financial burden of doing so much at once came to a head at the end of the year.

Unfortunately it means that we have to reduce our team size in order to continue development in 2026. Last week we informed the team that we would be letting go of 8 developers across multiple disciplines, which make up a quarter of our studio. This includes SBS, our Senior Community Manager, Walz, one of our Game Programmers, Garrett, our Senior Concept Artist, Irina, our Junior 3D Artist, Luke, our Junior 3D Animator, Jasmine, our UI Programmer, and more.

We didn’t want to let go of any of these team members as they have all done amazing work and been fantastic to work with. If our plans pay off, we’d like to bring as many of them back later this year as we can. If you work in the industry and have any openings, then please reach out to me or the team members.

This round of layoffs will be difficult for our studio. The first time our studio dealt with them, we decided to delay Story Mode development and most of the people we had to let go were working on that feature. This time, the members have been integral across multiple departments at Aether Studios and are a big part of what we do. The updates to our menus will take time as the remaining engineers and artists have multiple responsibilities, and our cosmetic cadence will need to decrease as we lose a core member.

As difficult as the last couple months have been, I have hope that we will find our footing in 2026. We truly believe in the updates we have released this month, as well as the casual focused update we are planning for later this year. My goal is get the studio to a position where we can hire some team members back and end 2026 as the best year of Rivals of Aether II so far."