Idle Games has let 25 employees go, roughly a third of its overall workforce. The social game company still has 40 employees working at the company, including its founding members and senior engineers.

Many of those laid off were working on the developer’s massively multiplayer Facebook game Idle Worship. The game dropped from 30,000 daily active users five weeks after its launch to its current 10,000.

“You either needed medication because you loved it so much or you just didn’t play it,” says Idle Games founder and CEO Jeffy Hyman. “There was no happy medium.”

While Idle Worship was positively received and is currently nominated for a GDC Online Award (under the “Online Innovation” category), it wasn’t enough to make the game a success. “There’s a good life lesson there that you don’t need to innovate on every single vector,” he says.”In order to be successful you don’t want the press, reviews and accolades. You want bucket loads of money.”

For the time being, Idle Worship now pays for itself with $0.12 to $0.13 per daily user. Currently, the company is focused on Fresh Deck Poker, which has 20,000 daily active users before its official launch and will probably grow even more with its cross-platform gameplay and real-money prizes.

Find out more about Idle Worship in this [a]list feature.

Source: Inside Social Games