The mass layoffs that have hit video games over the past year are a tragedy on a number of levels. There's of course the tragedy for those immediately affected: families uprooted, careers derailed. There's the wider tragedy for all of us: shuttered studios and cancelled projects are signs of an increasingly precarious industry, and means there will be fewer video games to enjoy.
To be aware of the former involves knowing those affected directly. To learn of the latter--or for the latter to be reported in the media so that people are able to learn--it's usually a company that's well-known, or it's a game you're aware of that has been binned. But not every closure is going to resonate with the wider public. Axis Studios is the kind of place that lived its life under the radar of most fans. Yet its "collapse" this week is a huge loss, for those personally affected (obviously) but also for fans and the wider industry, because over the years Axis made some very cool shit.
As an animation and VFX studio, Axis was rarely in the spotlight, because everything it made tended to be part of something else, for somebody else's thing. But they've been behind the scenes for over two decades now, creating clips that you might not know by name, but will definitely know.
Let's start with Dead Island's 2011 announcement trailer. One of the most famous and effective video game trailers of all time, it was a three-minute film so powerful that it damned the actual game, which couldn't hope to recapture the same energy:
More recently, if you played Halo: Infinite, you would have sat through the game's lavish cinematic intro sequence. Axis made that too:
As an example of something bigger, if you have kids and/or enjoy Christmas, you might have seen Netflix's Scrooge movie, which Axis animated:
In the past decade Axis has created trailers and cinematics for Halo, Gears of War, Elder Scrolls, Deathloop, League of Legends, Clash of Clans, Dawn of War, Call of Duty, Age of Empires, Destiny, Crackdown and Alien Isolation. Just to name a few. The showreel below highlights some of their animation work from just the last 12 months:
Axis was founded 24 years ago, but found itself forced to close this week due to "severe cash flow problems", which administrators say was due to "a decline in customer projects, as well as increases in labour costs". Those are hollow terms that don't really do the situation justice; Axis actually found itself just the latest casualty in a VFX and outsourcing crisis that has been decimating animation and effects studios the world over.
The studio's collapse leaves 162 people out of work, and every single project in production Axis had been working on has now been halted. Four employees remain, cruelly, to "help wind up the business".
