In Brief:
- Illuvium (official site) co-founder Kieran Warwick says staff have signed off on another wage reduction, which leaves the studio holding more than 12 months of runway.
- The move comes after half a year of cost trimming and a February 2025 restructuring that cut headcount from 110 to 65.
- According to Illuvium’s official account, Obelisk Rising — the studio’s creature collection action RPG — is “getting closer.” A release date still hasn’t been set.
Staff at Illuvium have accepted a fresh round of wage cuts, and co-founder Kieran Warwick says the reductions have lifted the studio’s runway back over the 12-month mark.
“Over the past six months, we’ve heavily reduced costs across the studio. Most recently, the team agreed to reduce their wages even further to preserve runway,” Warwick wrote in a post on X. “With these changes, we now have over 12 months of runway again.”
We are still here.
We still believe in gaming.
@obelisk_rising is getting closer.@IlluviumView on X ↗
Left unsaid: the current burn rate, the size of the newest reductions, and how many people remain on the payroll.
The second round of cuts
Roughly 18 months have passed since the previous one.
Illuvium restructured in February 2025, taking its team from 110 people down to 65. Warwick said at the time that developers were spared entirely, with the layoffs concentrated in marketing, operations, security and quality assurance — QA duties were passed to the community. At its high point, headcount had reached 200.
The goal of that round was to pull monthly burn down from roughly $950,000 to $500,000 by the close of March 2025. Certain contributors accepted pay reductions, while others agreed to receive ILV instead of USD. Warwick said the two measures together secured 24 months of runway for the studio.
The number he’s quoting now is 12.
Costs had been cut two months before that as well. Monthly spending fell to $900,000 in December 2024 via what Warwick described as tough decisions — admins stopped taking a salary, and wages dropped by another $85,000 on top.
Warwick had also indicated that Illuvium intended to pursue outside funding around March 2025. Once the restructuring was done, he said the franchise had no plans to raise “right now,” and he hasn’t publicly updated that position since.
Where Obelisk Rising stands
Sitting at the heart of Illuvium's MMO ambitions, Obelisk Rising is a creature collection action RPG — and the only shipping target the studio referenced in its update.
So far the game has stayed in closed pre-alpha. January 2026 brought a playtest, and developer chats have walked through the Illuvial bond system, ranger level gating, monetization via a fuel subscription, and utility for existing NFT collections spanning shards, gems, ores, ingots, essences, weapons and suits.
A follow-up dev chat on May 27 dug deeper into the design, covering horizontal progression, modular armor, scalable dungeons built for three to four players, drone professions, and a live poison mini-boss playtest with scaling difficulty. Warwick’s team has framed the goal as a Pokemon MMO blended with WoW and RuneScape.
There’s no announced launch date. Signups for a Founder’s List are live on the game’s site.
Background
Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Sydney, Illuvium released three interconnected games on the Epic Games Store on July 25, 2024, following a stretch of private betas and a play-to-airdrop campaign.
Open-world exploration title Overworld was reworked after the 2025 restructuring into what Warwick termed an MMO Lite — part of a pivot he sold to the community as concentrating on a single game rather than three. The studio has continued holding community calls too, among them a run of daily sessions with Warwick that began Jan. 26, 2026 and covered five products.
Illuvium’s own account presented the runway news less as a financial disclosure and more as proof of life.
“We are still here,” it posted. “We still believe in gaming. @obelisk_rising is getting closer.”