The brutal turnover at SMITE 2 developer Hi-Rez this year saw one of its highest-profile departures as studio president Stewart Chisam is on his way out at the company.
“Lots of leadership is gone. Stew, Radar, Travis, etc […] Part of me is just super bitter,” former Hi-Rez dev Thor posted on Twitter. That’d be Stewart Chisam and Travis Brown.
Hi-Rez’s Alex Cantatore went into more detail on Reddit. “Unfortunately, there were a handful of layoffs in senior management positions only last Thursday,” he acknowledged.
“Stew is transitioning away from Hi-Rez as part of this. Travis and Radar were also affected, as well as two folks in senior management on the Rally Here side of the business. I am very sad to be losing all of them. Essentially, the board’s rationale was that the company had a lot of senior management in relation to our current size. This does not affect our core mission, or any other people working directly on SMITE 2. We will continue to focus our efforts on improving the core game and new player experience, while adding more Gods at our current one-per-two-weeks pace. I will now be leading Titan Forge, and I will miss Travis and Radar dearly. I made the call to not make a big statement about this. Perhaps not the right call as the news was somewhat bound to leak, but I felt like Travis, Radar, or Stew should be allowed to make their own statement if they chose to given the fact that so few people were affected.”
In a letter on Linkedin over the weekend, Chisam himself confirmed that he is leaving the studio after a very long tenure: “It’s bittersweet to share that, in June, I am leaving Hi-Rez Studios after 17 years. This is a transition that has been discussed for a long time, but the timing was finally right.”
He discussed the transition of leadership, saying, “Erez Goren, who had taken back the CEO role of Hi-Rez in 2023 and who has always been Chairman and Founder and the true soul of the company, will continue to lead the company, and has a great vision for how to carry the company forward. Alex Cantatore will be handling the day-to-day general management of the Titan Forge studio. Alex has been doing a great job with SMITE 2, and the game will continue as [it] marches toward a future full 1.0 release.”
