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Reports suggest 22Cans has suffered a spate of staff departures, with a mix of developers resigning and others being asked to leave.
GameSpot claims the Guildford studio faces a series of problems surrounding its prominent Godus title, a Kickstarter project that 22Cans founder Peter Molyneux said would reinvent the god game genre.
Producer Jemma Harris has already left the firm, and reports say other members of the team have moved onto the developer’s next title, The Trial. A source told GameSpot the Godus team "have either quit their jobs or have been moved onto a new project".
Develop has also been in contact with a member of 22Cans planning to branch out on their own.
Molyneux told GameSpot that the departures were nothing to be concerned about: "As always happens in development, when you finish something and start something new, then you very often refresh your team.
"Sometimes you do that by asking some of your team to leave, and sometimes people on the team want to look elsewhere. If you try and force people who are creative to do the same thing again and again, very often they get bored. I wish they didn’t, but it happens with many game projects.
"What you don’t want are people who are bored and tired to work on that project. You want passionate people, and that means recruiting those people."
Molyneux added that 22Cans is actually hiring for new designers, artists and coders, hoping that – by the end of the recruitment drive – the studio will be "a bit bigger".
The turmoil follows increasing complaints about how far Godus is from fulfilling the promises made by its original Kickstarter appeal, which were first defined in 2012.
Specifically, consumers and press have noted that there seems to be no sign of the promised multiplayer mode or Linux version, with Godus designer Konrad Naszynski openly stating on the game’s forums that he doesn’t believe these promises are achievable.
Molyneux acknowledged these issues, but claims what remains of the Godus team is working towards those goals.
"I’m not worried about those pledges," he said. "I do worry about the Linux version pledge, because we do need the middleware that we use [Marmalade] to update to support Linux, which it currently does not.
"I take the point that some of the pledges should have been met, and that we should have taken the time to work on them."
