Lays Off

A couple of months ago, PAYDAY developer Starbreeze announced it was making a Dungeons and Dragons co-op game after licensing the popular franchise from Wizards of the Coast.

Hidden Path Entertainment founder and creative director Michael Austin confirmed on LinkedIn yesterday that the studio has laid off 44 employees, as spotted by Game Developer.

The previously announced D&D open world roleplaying game in development at Hidden Path Entertainment has now been officially paused by the studio based in Bellevue, Washington.

Reikon Games has reportedly laid off 60 to 70 people, equating to 56 percent of the company.

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Ruiner developer Reikon Games has reportedly laid off 60 to 70 people, or roughly 80% of its workforce, according to Kotaku.

According to reporting from Kotaku, Black Forest Games has announced the termination of 50% of its overall workforce, which was said to be around 110 employees in 2023. They join a growing list of layoffs experienced in the industry, which continues to accelerate from last year.

Black Forest Games, the studio behind the recent Destroy All Humans! 1 and 2 remakes, has reportedly laid off about 50 people. This news comes from Kotaku, which learned from a source with knowledge of the situation that these layoffs were announced yesterday, January 24, and that more information about them would be provided next week. 

According to IGN, Microsoft has fired 1,900 employees from its video game divisions including Xbox and Activision Blizzard. The layoffs affect almost 9% of the 22,000 employees at the company. In a memo to staff, Microsoft Gaming CEO claims the layoffs come after leadership at Microsoft Gaming and Activision Blizzard identified areas of overlap following the recent acquisition of Activision, Blizzard, and King.

Microsoft has laid off 1,900 employees from its gaming division—mainly roles at Activision Blizzard King, but also some at Xbox and ZeniMax Media.

Microsoft is laying off around 8% of its Gaming Workforce, affecting game developers across Xbox, ZeniMax Media, and the newly acquired Activision Blizzard.

People Can Fly, the developer behind 2021's surprise shooter hit Outriders, has laid off more than 30 employees. This news comes by way of Kotaku, which reports that its source with knowledge of the situation said the job cuts affected only staff working on an unannounced game at the studio, codenamed Project Gemini, that is to be published by Square Enix. 

People Can Fly has laid off 30 employees, and reallocated 20 others, from Project Gemini.

People Can Fly, the developer behind the likes of Outriders and Bulletstorm, has reportedly laid off «over 30 people» working on a currently unannounced game — codenamed Project Gemini — that's set to be published by Square Enix.

The new year continues to be a difficult one for the games industry, with Riot Games announcing layoffs affecting about 11% of their global workforce, or around 530 people. The company is also trimming its portfolio, shutting down Riot Forge, pulling back on some other projects, and recentering on its four core live titles: League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, Valorant, and Wild Rift.

Riot Games, the publisher-developer company behind League of Legends, has announced that it is laying off 530 employees. Plus, it's ending new game development under its Riot Forge arm, which produced third-party-developed games with the «A League of Legends Story» tag, like Ruined King, The Mageseeker, Song of Nunu, and the upcoming Bandle Tale, which will be the last in this line of releases. 

League of Legends developer Riot Games has announced that it's laying off 11% of its workforce, representing 530 employees.

Riot Games announced another big round of layoffs for the second year in a row. This time around, the studio mainly known for the League of Legends franchise plans to remove 11% of its large workforce. Around 530 employees will lose their jobs, although they will get benefits such as six months of severance pay at minimum, cash bonuses, and others.

We’re not even a month through 2024 and it’s looking to be a rough year for the games industry. Massive developer and publisher Riot Games, home to League of Legends and Valorant, announced today it has laid off 530 employees or roughly 11% of its workforce. Legends of Runetterra, Riot’s competitor to Hearthstone, is also seeing a reduction in team size and will shift focus to its Path of Champions PvE game mode. Riot Forge, a division of Riot Games that focuses on teaming up with established developers and creating unique single-player experiences in the Runterra universe, will also be sunset.

Riot Games is laying off roughly 530 people, or about 11% of its global workforce, in a move the company says is "a necessity" and not "to appease shareholders."

League of Legends publisher Riot Games has cut 11% of its staff, resulting in 530 layoffs. The major company restructure will see the company’s entire Riot Forge studio shut down and include cuts to theLegends of Runeterra development team.

2K-owned 31st Union laid off a small number of staff yesterday, the studio has confirmed.

CI Games, the publisher behind last year's Lords of the Fallen and the Sniper Ghost Warrior franchise, has laid off 10 percent of its staff, as first reported by GamesIndustry.biz. The publication says its sources pointed to laid-off staff posting about the job cuts on LinkedIn, but has since received confirmation from CI Games.

Polish video game developer and publisher CI Games has laid off 10 percent of its staff.

Behaviour Interactive has reportedly laid off 45 staff.

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PTW, a support studio that's worked with some of the industry's biggest companies like Blizzard, Capcom, and Sega, has laid off about 45 people, as first reported by Kotaku. PTW was previously called Pole To Win and its services include quality assurance, studio support, and localization. Last week, on January 11, someone with knowledge of the studio told Kotaku about the layoffs, noting that roughly 45 people lost their jobs. 

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Community chat application company, Discord, has laid off 170 employees, or 17 percent of its staff, according to a new report from The Verge. Discord CEO Jason Citron cites overhiring, which has led to the company becoming «less efficient» in how it operates. The layoffs affected people across various departments. 

Just one day after streaming service Twitch announced that it is laying off 500 employees, Discord has joined the parade: A report from The Verge says the company is cutting 170 employees, representing 17% of its workforce. A Discord representative confirmed with PC Gamer that The Verge's report is accurate.

Update: Twitch has now publicly confirmed that it has laid off «just over 500 people.» 

According to arecent report, Bossa Studios has decided to layoff about 1/3 of their staff, as the team continues to focus on PvE Survival title Lost Skies.

UK developer Bossa Studios has laid off around one third of its staff, GamesIndustry.biz has learned.

2023 has not been a great year for the video game industry in terms of layoffs and studio closures, and as the year draws to a close, it’s been announced an entire publisher with dozens of games to its name is closing its doors. Versus Evil had become a bit of a rising star in the indie publishing sphere in recent years, publishing the likes of the Pillars of Eternity games, The Banner Saga, Tower of Guns, Faeria, and more. Unfortunately, that success was not enough to keep the publisher’s doors open.

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TinyBuild, the games label behind the Hello Neighbor series, has laid off the entire staff of Versus Evil, an indie publisher under the TinyBuild umbrella, just days before the holidays. This news comes from various former Versus Evil employees on Twitter. 

Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering owner Hasbro is laying off 1,100 employees.

One more grim notch for the 2023 games industry meat grinder. Australian indie studio League of Geeks is laying off over half its staff and pausing development «indefinitely» on early access starship management game Jumplight Odyssey.

Saber Interactive, a division of Embracer Group, has confirmed that it has laid off employees at its New World Interactive studio, the developer of Insurgency: Sandstorm.

Electronic Arts has implemented a round of layoffs at F1 developer Codemasters.

Phoenix Labs, the developer behind recent indie success Fae Farm, has laid off 34 staff.

Phoenix Labs this week had its second round of layoffs this year, as reported by a number of now-former employees on LinkedIn.

There's more bad news out of struggling gaming conglomerate Embracer: The company has confirmed that approximately 50 employees are being laid off from Chorus developer Fishlabs, and is also reportedly looking at closing TimeSplitters studio Free Radical Design completely.

Unity has reportedly shed more jobs, as the company has laid off 265 workers today as part of a «company reset.» The move also terminates the partnership that Unity had been in with Weta FX, though crucially, Unity retains its ownership of the Weta Digital tools it purchased back in 2021.

German developer Fishlabs is the latest Embracer outfit to experience job cuts.

Veteran German game developer Fishlabs is the latest Embracer-owned studio to suffer layoffs, VGC understands.

505 Games parent company Digital Bros have announced - you guessed it - a round of mass layoffs. Following in the wake of Microsoft, Epic, CD Projekt, Sony and, well, take your pick, the company aim to cut roughly 30% of their workforce to shore up profits. The specific reasoning here is that Digital Bros think that people aren't interested in playing original new games; they'd rather get to grips with fictions and franchises they know and love already. As such, the company plan to "limit" their big budget projects in future, though no specific cancellations have been announced.

30% of staff have been affected.

The videogame industry continues to be plagued by layoffs as 505 Games parent company Digital Bros has announced plans to eliminate roughly 30% of its total workforce. The company said the cuts are necessary because, simply put, gamers prefer sequels and remakes to brand-new games, and so that's what it's going to focus on.

Digital Bros Group, perhaps best-known in the video game industry as the owner of publisher 505 Games, which is behind the likes of Control: Ultimate Edition and Death Stranding PC, is laying off a whopping 30% of its global workforce and doubling down on sequels because that seems to be what the industry wants. 

Amazon Games is laying off 180 employees, primarily focusing on its Prime-related offerings. The entire team from Crown Channel, an Amazon-backed channel on Amazon-owned Twitch, has been let go, and the news adds to a miserable pile of layoffs across the gaming and tech industries in 2023: Amazon itself made 100 job cuts in April.

Amazon has laid off 180 people from its games division, including the entirety of the Crown Channel Twitch channel and the Game Growth team.

Amazon has announced that they are laying off 180 more employees in their gaming division.

Amazon Games today joins the list of gaming companies hit by layoffs. According to a memo circulated within the company, 180 employees will be affected by Amazon’s new cutbacks, which will include the entire Gaming Growth department and the Crown channel on Twitch. The company apparently plans to refocus its Gaming attention on its Prime Gaming offering.

180 employees in Amazon's video game division are being let go today, according to Aftermath's Nathan Grayson. 

Amazon is reportedly laying off 180 workers from its games division.

Amazon is laying off 180 jobs in its games division, hopping on the tragically overcrowded bandwagon of layoffs in the game industry this year. The news comes viaAftermath, which reports that the layoffs are focused in two areas – the Crown Twitch channel, which will reportedly be eliminated altogether, and the game growth teams. Employees were notified of the changes through an email from Christoph Hartman, VP of Amazon Games. This is the second wave of layoffs this division of the company has faced this year.

Amazon's gaming division has cut 180 jobs in what continues to be a terrible year for the gaming industry. These layoffs are felt throughout many of Amazon's gaming teams and come as part of the company's bid to restructure its Prime Gaming business.

According to a new report by Polygon, Warframe developer Digital Extremes has laid off a number of workers associated with its external projects and publishing teams as it starts the process of divesting itself from Airship Syndicate, the developer of Wayfinder. 

When Pico launched its Oculus Quest challenger in China last year, it did so with great optimism. Light (295 grams) and affordable ($420), the virtual reality headset released by the ByteDance-owned manufacturer was expected to drive adoption in a market inaccessible to Meta.

By Emma Roth, a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.

2023 continues to be the year of major video game layoffs as Ubisoft confirmed today that it has laid off 124 employees, several of them at its Montreal studios. According to Ubisoft, the employees are primarily in business administration and IT teams, and these layoffs are part of its efforts to “streamline our operations and enhance our collective efficiency.”

Today, Ubisoft is the latest developer to join 2023's wave of layoffs. According to IGN, the company laid off a total of 124 employees. 98 of them were based in Canada, which IGN calculates as roughly 2% of the company's Canadian workforce. The cuts included administrative and IT workers, some of whom were employed at the Hybride VFX studio, a company that has worked on shows like Ahsoka and The Mandalorian.

Ubisoft lays off 124 employees in the name of "enhanc[ing] collective efficiency", adding to the already huge number of job losses in the gaming industry this year.

Ubisoft has laid off 124 individuals today in an effort "to streamline our operations and enhance our collective efficiency," according to the company.

Cryptic Studios, the developer of the Star Trek Online and Neverwinter MMOs, has become the latest studio to lay off employees. The studio has confirmed that «difficult personnel changes» have made as a result of parent company Embracer Group's ongoing restructuring.

Bungie is the latest PlayStation studio to be hit with layoffs.

Destiny 2 developer Bungie is laying off an unspecified number of people, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons confirmed Monday after employees began speaking up about the job cuts on social media.

Destiny studio Bungie has reportedly laid off an unknown number of staff today, according to a Bloomberg report, which also says that The Final Shape expansion for Destiny 2 has been delayed.

Employees at Bungie have revealed the Destiny 2 studio is cutting staff. Multiple workers have posted on X that they've been let go by the Seattle-based developer, and at time of writing, the exact number of affected employees hasn't been revealed.

In what’s already been a crazy 2023, it appears another big studio has undergone layoffs. An email sent to Bungie employees from Bungie CEO Pete Parsons indicated staff would be “hearing some news today” and that a team meeting scheduled for later would “discuss today’s events”. Jason Schreier at Bloomberg saw and reported the circulating email.

 Embracer Group layoffs have hit animation studio Digic Pictures, which the company acquired in 2021. 

LinkedIn today announced layoffs that affect 668 employees.

Telltale Games has laid off an unknown portion of its staff, in an unfortunate deja vu moment for a handful of its employees. 

Telltale Games has laid off an unknown number of its team members due to "current market conditions," the California-based studio has confirmed.

Telltale has laid off an unspecified number of developers.

All unionized Dragon Age Dreadwolf QA testers have been laid off.

A Kotaku report says Naughty Dog, the developer of The Last of Us and Uncharted games, is the latest studio to lay off employees, with at least 25 contract workers being told that they'll be let go at the end of October. The report also says that The Last of Us multiplayer shooter spinoff announced in 2022 is in trouble, and while it hasn't been cancelled at this point, its fate remains uncertain.

Naughty Dog is laying off dozens of developers this month with no severance, according to a Kotaku report.