Aether Studios Layoffs Affect Concept Artist Who Helped Define Rivals

It seems that all is not well at the Aether Studios as Rivals of Aether II still struggles to find consistent support and sustain a playerbase almost two years after the initial release.

In January 2026 Dan Fornace, the studio's CEO and founder, shared a very frank update about the state of the game. While they have been very productive in terms of putting out new content and features, the financial state left a lot to be desired.

He pinpoints the post-release strategy as one of the main issues. They wanted to maintain the launch momentum and dedicated to expanding the studio to release more content and ship new improvements while also outsourcing the development of game's Steam Workshop integration.

These actions had a cost. The studio already had a round of layoffs in 2024, and this more recent post indicated that a studio lost another 8 developers, a quarter of their total staff. People who were critical to game's development.

A few months later and through their post on BlueSky people have learned that Marc Knelson was also laid off after 9 years at the studio. Marc was one of the key artists behind the game and had a big role in shaping its aesthetic, one of the characters is even literally named after him, or his nickname, to be specific.

However, what's no clear is if this indicates a new round of layoffs, or an echo of what we already knew in January. After all, that post only named 6 out of 8 affected team members. It doesn't help that Marc himself pointed out that he's not at liberty to answer.

There was already quite a bit of concern surrounding the future of the game, as well as a bit of infighting in the community over the divide between players of Rivals of Aether and RoA II.

As gamers do, these news resulted in further agitation that turned into hostility towards the studio and the people working there. Many were hoping that something this significant would be addressed, but was instead quietly ignored as the company announced an upcoming Q&A.

Marc personally had to chime in and ask people to cool down, as he didn't burn any bridges and seemingly departed from the studio on good terms.

The Q&A stream is fairly close at this point, so hopefully it's something that the company will address. There's too much doubt and uncertainty hanging in the air to simply ignore.