We recently reported on the overwhelmingly negative response from the Dauntless community after the game’s latest Awakening update and Steam launch. Now, Jessie Leigh Gagnon, a former Phoenix Labs developer and the former associate producer for Dauntless, has also weighed in on the current state of the game and the changes introduced by the indie developer. According to Gagnon’s post on LinkedIn, the creative team that birthed Dauntless and maintained it before Phoenix Labs’s dark times “never would have made decisions that are so blatantly not player focused.” She seemingly attributes the disastrous Steam launch and poor decision-making that led to the maligned update to the studio’s new ownership.
According to Gagnon’s description, when Dauntless was first launched, Phoenix Labs was an indie studio in the true sense. It was a group of passionate developers who simply wanted to create something fun. In this case a Monster Hunter-like game that wasn’t locked to the Nintendo DS and didn’t force its players to deal with “aching hands, cumbersome inventory management, and a lore that wasn’t super approachable.” Since then, though, Phoenix Labs has been through the wringer and lost much of its original creative talent and many of its former executives, supposedly all culminating in a game that seems to have put monetization before all else.
Gagnon goes on to plead with Phoenix Labs to correct course and focus on what made the ARPG what it is, stating that the “core gameplay and crafting mechanics” had been “gutted” in the recent update.
Dauntless today is no longer Free to Slay. They’ve gutted the core gameplay and crafting mechanics. The essence of the Slayers (who I named just over ten years ago), has been, in fact, slayed to ribbons. We never would have made decisions that are so blatantly not player focused.
I have the privilege of working in academia now, where I can be open and honest about my opinions on other games – and this is the time for me to speak up and say DO BETTER WITH DAUNTLESS. Please, if not for us creators, FOR THE PLAYERS.
Phoenix Labs was owned by a Singaporean company, Garena, between 2020 and 2023, when it was announced that an “investor-backed buyout” would place the game studio in the hands of its management team. It was never really revealed who the investors backing the management team were, but what followed was a massive round of layoffs and a management exodus, which included the then CEO and COO. As recently as October 2024, however, Game Developer received a tip that the mysterious buyout was funded by Forte Labs, a blockchain company. After the layoffs that followed the buyout, Dauntless went through a content drought, and two former Phoenix Labs employees who spoke to Game Developer revealed that Neil Young, the interim CEO who was in charge after the Forte take-over, “didn’t share the creative values” of Phoenix Labs.
