In Brief:
- Illuvium (official site) co-founder Kieran Warwick said the team agreed to reduce wages again, leaving the studio with more than 12 months of runway.
- The cut follows six months of cost reductions and a February 2025 restructuring that took headcount from 110 to 65.
- Illuvium‘s official account said Obelisk Rising, the studio’s creature collection action RPG, is “getting closer.” There’s still no release date.
Illuvium’s team agreed to another round of wage reductions, and co-founder Kieran Warwick said the cuts have pushed the studio’s runway back above 12 months.
“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 said 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 ↗
He didn’t give a current burn rate, didn’t say how deep the latest reductions go and didn’t disclose how many people are left at the studio.
The second round of cuts
It’s roughly 18 months since the last one.
Illuvium restructured in February 2025, dropping from 110 staff to 65. Warwick said at the time that none of the layoffs hit developers; the cuts landed on marketing, operations, security and quality assurance, with QA work handed off to the community. Headcount had peaked at 200.
That round was meant to bring monthly burn from about $950,000 down to $500,000 by the end of March 2025. Some contributors took pay reductions. Others agreed to be paid in ILV rather than USD. Warwick said the combination bought the studio 24 months of runway.
His latest figure is 12.
The company had already trimmed costs two months earlier. In December 2024 monthly spend came down to $900,000 through what Warwick called tough decisions, including admins no longer drawing a salary and overall wages falling by a further $85,000.
Warwick had said Illuvium planned to look for outside funding around March 2025. After the restructuring he said the franchise wasn’t looking to raise “right now.” He hasn’t revisited that publicly since.
Where Obelisk Rising stands
Obelisk Rising is the creature collection action RPG at the center of Illuvium’s MMO plans, and it’s the only shipping target the studio pointed to in the update.
The game has been in closed pre-alpha. A playtest ran in January 2026, and the team has held developer chats covering the Illuvial bond system, ranger level gating, monetization through a fuel subscription and utility for existing NFT collections including shards, gems, ores, ingots, essences, weapons and suits.
A second dev chat on May 27 went further into the design: horizontal progression, modular armor, scalable dungeons for three to four players, drone professions and a live poison mini-boss playtest with scaling difficulty. Warwick’s team has described the target as a Pokemon MMO crossed with WoW and RuneScape.
No launch date has been announced. A Founder’s List signup is open on the game’s site.
Background
Illuvium was founded in 2020 and is based in Sydney. It put three interconnected games on the Epic Games Store on July 25, 2024, after a run of private betas and a play-to-airdrop campaign.
Overworld, the open-world exploration title, was reworked after the 2025 restructuring toward what Warwick called an MMO Lite, part of a shift he pitched to the community as focusing on one game at a time instead of three. Illuvium has also kept running community calls, including a series of daily sessions with Warwick starting Jan. 26, 2026, covering five products.
The studio’s own account framed the runway update less as a financial disclosure than a sign of life.
“We are still here,” it posted. “We still believe in gaming. @obelisk_rising is getting closer.”
