ATMTA Restructures Amid Star Atlas Development Challenges

Automata (ATMTA) will undergo “a significant headcount reduction” to preserve its capacity to develop Star Atlas.

After the reorganization, the Automata team will consist of 45 members, down from 235 at the end of 2022. Michael Wagner, CEO and co-founder of ATMTA, announced on July 24 via Discord that the restructured team will instead transfer its focus to “delivering SAGE and the newly announced Crew Mobile App.”

“We also had to pay a material tax liability approaching $30 million. And as many of you already know, we lost approximately $15 million from our treasury with the collapse of FTX, which represented a significant portion of our liquid cash balance.”

The development of a software development kit (SDK) that combines Unreal Engine 5 and Solana will “resume at a significantly slower pace.”

The SDK is the foundation for the Star Atlas game. Wagner wrote that approximately 33 percent of the project’s revenue was collected as the in-game token Atlas, which the team “steadfastly held.”

In the past year, the token has lost approximately 80% of its value. In addition, according to the developers, the team was able to recover a “significant portion” of the FTX funds in January, but the runway remains “extremely constrained.”

“It is a hard truth that our current high rate of AAA-quality development is capital intensive and, at present, unsustainable without a significant shift in business strategy.”

Wagner added that it was “unlikely” that the project would complete a January equity and debt financing deal.

During the same period, Solana blockchain utilization reached an all-time high in the first half of 2023.

In Q2, the network had 100% uptime. This year, the Solana Foundation introduced grants to support the ecosystem.