Perfect World shuts down Torchlight studio, cuts jobs at Gigantic’s developer

Perfect World is shutting down Runic Games and laying off employees at Motiga Games. Runic made the torchlight dungeon-crawling role-playing adventures before releasing the Hob action game in September. Motiga is working on the Gigantic multiplayer online battle arena.

The publisher isn’t shutting down Gigantic, but it is only keeping support staff to keep it up and running. Runic, however, is closing down. Hob is a solo experience, and Perfect World explained that it wants to move away from that and shift even more into online connected games, such as its Dungeons & Dragons-based Neverwinter MMO from Cryptic Studios.