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Factor 5 face "financial issues"

Lair developer unable to pay staff as project faces cancellation

Sam Baker, an animator with Factor 5, has revealed that the developer is undergoing "financial issues" since the collapse of the publisher Brash Entertainment, leading to the cancellation of a project and unpaid wages.

Posting on his blog, Barker described his experience of returning to work for the studio after a stint with an outside animation studio. He described how staff had not been paid and that employees were only staying on to keep the company afloat.

"I find out no one at Factor 5 had been paid in a month," Baker wrote, "and we weren't going to any time soon."

"Without proper funding on the project I was working on, the company was forced to stop production. Unfortunately I was finally having a ton of fun working on it and we had made such insane progress that this was a total kick to the chest."

"Regardless of the financial issues of the company (which I won't elaborate on), we all stayed and continued to work. If we left, there would have been no hope in F5 staying afloat."

"The president of the company basically told us that if we didn't receive funding in one week, all of us should move on and look elsewhere for another job," Baker continued.

In response to media reports on his blog post, Baker removed the entry and issued a clarifying statement.

"The other projects currently under way at Factor 5 are doing great," he explained. "We hadn't received payment because of the situation with Brash, which is why I said I needed to look elsewhere for work."

He added: "I removed my blog because it contained information that easy to misinterpret."