Shocking news has emerged that Clover Games, the studio well-known for Lord of Heroes and Heaven Hells, has carried out massive restructuring and layoffs.
Clover Games officially stated, "It is true that there has been some restructuring, but we cannot confirm the scale," but the atmosphere within the industry is incredibly grim. What makes this situation particularly shocking is that it happened a mere 10 days after the official launch of their brand-new title, Heaven Hells, on February 4th.
Currently, dark rumors are swirling about the scale of these layoffs on Blind (an anonymous community app for verified employees in Korea) and various gaming industry forums. It seems to go far beyond a simple workforce reduction; there are specific claims that "only about 10 people were left at the developer, and the rest of the staff received recommended resignations." With employees posting farewell messages to each other on Blind, there are growing concerns that the company is essentially being dismantled.
Truth be told, rumors of Clover Games being in a crisis are not exactly new. Lord of Heroes, launched in 2020, won the Excellence Award at the Korea Game Awards and captured both revenue and popularity domestically and internationally. For years, it has been the single pillar keeping the company afloat.
However, the performance of the follow-up titles released after Lord of Heroes has been disastrous. It's Me, which they ambitiously prepared and launched globally before bringing to Korea in 2023, met a bitter end with its service terminating after just one year. Ayakashi Rise, released in 2025, is technically still in service, but it has completely fallen off players' radar and is practically buried.
Ultimately, the company had been barely hanging on with Lord of Heroes while pouring everything into developing a new game, and the result of that desperate effort was Heaven Hells, released just this past 4th.
I personally played Heaven Hells too, but from the very beginning, it suffered from severe optimization issues, device overheating, and game-breaking bugs that made it barely playable. It made me wonder, "Why did they rush this release so much?" Hearing the news of these mass layoffs, the pieces of the puzzle are finally falling into place. It seems highly likely that the company's financial situation and internal struggles reached a breaking point, forcing them to push the game out before they even had time to polish it.
With the news of massive layoffs breaking just ten days after a new release, not only are the veteran Lord of Heroes players panicking, but the new players who just started spending money on Heaven Hells are completely bewildered and are already inquiring about refunds.
When a game developer's internal foundation shakes, that instability inevitably bleeds directly into the game's quality and live service operations. A rushed launch followed immediately by massive restructuring—whether Clover Games can overcome this crisis or if they will collapse entirely remains to be seen. But right now, the reality is that their future looks incredibly bleak.
Read the original Korean post here.
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