Aftermath had a meeting last night (if you don’t know me, I love meetings), and we were talking about how easy it is to write too much bummer news. This is an accusation often leveraged at the press–that we truck in the grim for clicks, that we never point out when good things are happening. If one of your definitions of the news is something unusual happening (“man bites dog” instead of “dog bites man,” as the saying goes), the notably unusual is often bad. But then we have games industry layoffs, a stream of bad news so endless that a day without layoffs would be unusual.
Here are some layoffs that happened or came to light yesterday:
- Thunderful laid off around 20% of its staff, according to GamesIndustry.biz, which is roughly 100 people. Thunderful is behind games like SteamWorld Dig. Don’t worry, the CEO feels bad about it, saying, “It has been difficult to make these decisions, and it saddens me that we will have to say goodbye to many skilled colleagues and partners.”
- CI Games laid off 10% of its staff, also according to GI.biz. It looks like these cuts struck the marketing department and the studios behind Lords of the Fallen and Sniper Ghost Warrior. The CEO called this a “tough but necessary decision.”
- Mobile studio Pixelberry had an unknown number of layoffs, Game Developer reports. Owned by gaming giant Nexon, Pixelberry made games like High School Story and Choices: Stories You Play. Nexon confirmed the layoffs to GI.biz, but didn’t give an eye-rolling show of regret.
- 45 people were laid off at Behaviour Interactive’s Montreal studio; Kotaku broke the news yesterday, but said the layoffs took place between January 9-11 (a week when we were all busy thinking about the layoffs at Discord and Twitch). Behaviour is behind the game Dead by Daylight. No official comment on this one yet. (Update 1:31pm--Behaviour tells Eurogamer that "In these situations, our preference is always to reassign talent to other projects... Unfortunately, this option is not always available to us." The company says the layoffs "represented less than three percent of our total workforce.")
- Wimo Games closed, costing around 35 people their jobs, our bad news pals at GI.biz reported. The VR studio made games like Battle Bows and RPG Dice: Heroes of Whitestone. No official statement on this one either. (Update 1/25/24: Wimo Games CEO Dave Rosen said in a statement last week, "I can confirm that this week we began winding down operations at WIMO Games. It’s been an incredible three years working with this fantastic team and this is not the outcome we had hoped for.")
- Netspeak Games announced it will lay off 25 employees. Game Developer writes that the studio is working on its debut game, Sunshine Days, which it is going to keep working on, just with less people I guess? In a January 16 blog post, the CEO wrote, “The decision to engage in a redundancy process has not been easy, particularly given the effect this will have on our dedicated and hardworking team.”
- Gaming-adjacent, YouTube saw 100 people laid off on its business side, The Verge reported. It’s part of an ongoing bloodbath over at Google, which lost 1000 employees on the 11th and hundreds more in ad sales on the 16th. If you work there (not a bad chance, considering the mind-bending number of layoffs it’s having) and a CEO told you something insulting about how bad they feel about axing your job, let me know.
Also let me know if I missed something! It would be easy to do, given what a nightmare 2024 is turning out to be for keeping your job. (Kotaku is doing the lord’s work of trying to keep up with it all, and here’s a tracker spreadsheet.)
The White House insists things are looking good for jobs, and I’m willing to believe that’s true across the board, but it certainly doesn’t seem true in my industry–journalism–and the gaming and tech industries my journalism covers. Yesterday also saw music outlet Pitchfork folded into GQ (music is for boys now!), with many journalists losing their jobs. And while not layoffs yet, local paper The Baltimore Sun was recently purchased by David Smith of propaganda fans Sinclair, with Smith telling Sun reporters who asked about their futures that they “[have] a job today.”
Maybe you’re bummed out now! I’ve written 640 words about things that suck, and that’s not even touching on the things that suck that aren’t about jobs. But it’s good to be informed about what’s happening in your world or the world of things you care about. If I take off my journalist hat (currently a Writers Guild of America East beanie) and put on my news reader hat (also the beanie; go unions!), having knowledge lets me see the edges of something that can feel like an all-consuming blob of despair. Reporting the news won’t bring back people’s jobs (the supposed line between “journalism” and “activism” is a story for another blog), but readers armed with that knowledge can take the action they feel called toward to not let the people in power dictate their lives. Worker-owned outlets (hey, like this one!) have been one response to journalism layoffs; unionization and cooperatively owned studios have been some responses in games.
I hope everyone who’s been affected by layoffs ends up in a good place, finding new jobs or forging new paths. Here’s a live feed of sea otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, if anyone needs some cheering up.
