Back in August this year, Lineage developer NCSoft decided to pull the plug on one of its in-progress projects, the real-time strategy MMORPG Tactan: Knights of the Gods (source: MTN). Subsequently, the title’s 100-member development team at studio Ludius Games was restructured, with a good chunk of employees leaving the company through voluntary buyouts. While this isn’t a case of one-sided layoffs, the events leading up to Tactan’s cancellation are a bit surprising.
As reported by GameMeca, Tactan (initially codenamed Project G) started as an in-house project within NCSoft, and it was accordingly announced as an NCSoft title in 2023. However, in October 2024, the game’s development team was spun off into a separate, wholly owned subsidiary called Ludius Games. Reportedly, NCSoft then told Ludius Games that it would not be publishing Tactan, and that the studio would have to find its own, external publisher if it wanted to release the game.
Tactan’s developers began searching for a publisher but failed to secure a deal, which ultimately led to management cancelling the project. As of recent, the studio has been downsized significantly, with just 25 employees being retained, and about 80 being offered to either transfer to other posts or voluntarily resign. It seems most employees chose to leave with 20-30 months’ worth of salary as severance. The remaining staff are expected to start work on a new project.
The decision of NCSoft, as a parent company and major game publisher, to not publish Tactan is unusual, especially given that development started out at their headquarters. GameMeca suggests this might have been an indirect way of pressuring Ludius Games to drop the project: (via machine translation) “Once the parent company declines to publish a project, the likelihood of another publisher signing a contract for a game from an NCSoft subsidiary is virtually nonexistent. It’s simply not rational for a business to invest in and service a title that even its own parent company has deemed unworthy of release. NCSoft must have been well aware that finding a new publisher under those circumstances would be extremely difficult.”
To begin with, NCSoft’s decision to spin off Ludius Games (alongside three other independent subsidiaries) came as part of a corporate split off amidst weakening financial performance (source: The Korea Times). Upcoming measures to streamline business operations (including restructuring and project terminations) had already been announced at the time, which means Tactan’s cancellation had likely already been in consideration before Ludius Games was tasked with (and failed to) find an external publisher.
