Red Rover Interactive is cutting 22 roles and has delayed its debut game, the survival title Enginefall, to 2027, GamesIndustry.biz reported on July 10.
CEO Fred Richardson said the extended development schedule is what forces the reduction, and framed the two decisions as a single trade-off. Writing on LinkedIn, he pointed to what the studio learned from Enginefall's appearance at this year's Steam Next Fest, which the report says drew more than 200,000 players.
It showed us the work still ahead: new player experience, performance, cheat protection, and overall clarity. Finishing that work to a standard the game deserves requires more time than our previous plan allowed, and taking that time responsibly means a smaller team.
Playtesting is continuing, with larger closed sessions scheduled to resume later this year. Richardson said the studio has engaged a specialist games recruiter to support the affected staff and is drawing on its wider network to help them find new roles.
A well-funded studio with a survival-game thesis
Red Rover Interactive was founded in June 2023 by developers whose credits include DayZ, Crysis 2, Ghost Recon and Dune: Awakening. It raised roughly $5 million in seed funding at launch, led by Behold Ventures and The Games Fund.
A year later the studio added a $15 million round led by Krafton, the PUBG publisher, with Tirtra Ventures and Overwolf joining as new investors alongside returning backers The Games Fund and Behold Ventures. That money was earmarked for the project then codenamed Coltrane, which became Enginefall.
Richardson had previously told GamesIndustry.biz that the studio was set up to chase an opening in the survival genre, arguing it had "real potential for breakout growth" while the market drifted toward more curated, PvE and smaller-scale multiplayer designs. The delay pushes the studio's first test of that thesis out by another year.
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