Gigantic Survived Multiple Death Sentences To Make It To Launch

After four years of development, Gigantic has finally launched into the wild. But for a while, it didn't look like it would make it to the finish line. When we talked with CEO Chris Chung last year, he said "We had to lay off everyone." Last week, he talked to PC Gamer and repeated that story, while also telling a few more.

Gigantic was announced in mid-2014, several months before Overwatch, but it now launches into a market that includes not only Blizzard's title, but games like Paladins and Battleborn, as well as the upcoming LawBreakers and Quake Champions. According to the interview, Gigantic was supposed to launch two years ago, but the difficulty in adapting for Windows 10 -- thanks to an exclusivity deal with Microsoft -- rendered much of its initial development obsolete.

After the biggest set of layoffs in February 2016, many employees still kept coming into work. The company survived until forging a publishing deal with Perfect World Entertainment, which sent Motiga the money it needed to keep its staff funded -- even before the deal was signed.

Now that the game has launched, of course, that's just the beginning. Chung admits that "What we have released so far is probably less than half of what we have in the pipeline right now." With the stability of a launch and, ideally, some income being generated from players, here's hoping the dev team has a chance to realize those goals.