Leaked Interview: Aether Gazer Dev Scandal
Summary
𝘼𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙂𝙖𝙯𝙚𝙧 𝙁𝙖𝙣 𝙎𝙚𝙧𝙫𝙚𝙧 posts a summary of a leaked former-employee interview exposing alleged nepotism, budget mismanagement, and rushed releases. The announcement covers claims of mass overstaffing, halted character development, a fired lead writer over schedule disputes, and executive decisions that may have led to shutdown.
‼️A now former-employee of Aether Gazer development team interview has been leaked ‼️
(Due to confidentiality I don't want to post the original transcript of the interview. But rather to summarize the major parts on the transcript on bullet points)
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AG staff had 200-300 people working on AG, but game only feels its being made around 100. Its because those 200 people are being catered in (via nepotism) and working as freeloaders.Yongshi will have 400m yuan budget, which 2/3 of Genshin dev cost (around 600m), so they can go big if they decide to focus one game. But no, due to sheer incompetent, that budget was wasted and is being spread towards those 200 nepo-employees. And AG went EoU as the result.
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Higher-ups wanted to have Skuld be released 6 months since the revenue weren't doing well. But it would cause their whole schedule to be completely exploded. One of the lead writers who refused to release Skuld early was fired, the company held a meeting- and the next day the writer was no longer there. [The Writer that was fired was the one who wrote for Verthandi's Story-Chapter 19]
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Back in end of 2025, higher-ups already decided to shut the game down. As for the AG devs team, they already have so much character progress and development-including Changgeng was instantly halted. There were demos but it wasn't continued. Thus the players got the last character developed, Ookuninushi.
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Higher-ups want to copy a trend whenever a game becomes popular but they can't figure out how to copy it properly. At one point when Path to Nowhere (PtN) was very popular, higher-ups ordered artists to have Lu Wu have a "Tactical T" type of character design. The artists could only silently put up with it and make the changes, this also includes Bai Ze.
