It's important to note that Dauntless had a great run during its peak, but it encountered continuous challenges after Phoenix Labs was acquired by blockchain company Forte Labs in 2023.

(Phoenix Labs Image)Canadian video game developer Phoenix Labs, creator of Dauntless and Fae Farm, announced Monday that it’s laying off a majority of its staff.The news came via a post on Phoenix Labs’ official LinkedIn page, and was first spotted by Game Developer.“We have made the tough decision to part ways with the majority of the studio as part of unfortunate but necessary changes to our operations,” the company wrote. “We will share more details in the coming weeks about what this means for Dauntless and Fae Farm.”GeekWire reached out to Phoenix Labs for additional comment.The company has around 90 employees, according to LinkedIn.These layoffs are the latest in a long series of downsizings, reorganizations, and studio closures across the video game industry, and may potentially be the largest so far this year. Other affected companies in 2025 include the French conglomerate Ubisoft, which shuttered a studio in the UK on Monday, and a small number of dismissals at Seattle’s Highwire Games.In Phoenix Labs’ case, however, these layoffs could bechalked up to the failure of Awakening, the most recent expansion for Phoenix Labs’ flagship project Dauntless, which received a chilly reception from players when it released on Dec. 5.Debuting in 2018, Dauntless is a live service game that challenges players to hunt down enormous monsters called Behemoths, either alone or in small teams online. After a successful hunt, players can use parts of fallen Behemoths to create better weapons and armor, which allows them to take on more and bigger challenges.Awakening was advertised as a big mechanical update for Dauntless, and came out alongside its long-awaited debut on Steam. On release, it quickly came under fire for a new, unannounced monetization strategy.Players logged into Dauntless to discover Awakening had added a new series of aggressive microtransactions, and that much of players’ previously existing progress through the game had been reset

RippleXDev's $100 million investment in Forte Gaming for the XRPL ecosystem, coupled with Ripple CTO David Schwartz's perspectives on the role of former Ripple employees in XRPL-related projects.