GamesActionPenny’s Big Breakaway studio announces layoffs: ‘Evening Star has been swept up in the same turbulence that has affected so many of our peers in the games industry’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesActionPenny’s Big Breakaway studio announces layoffs: ‘Evening Star has been swept up in the same turbulence that has affected so many of our peers in the games industry’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Evening Star)
“This was a post that I was hoping to not have to write, but Evening Star has been swept up in the same turbulence that has affected so many of our peers in the games industry for the last year and a half,” CEO and executive producer Dave Padilla wrote onLinkedIn.
“Despite our best efforts to secure another project to keep our team together, we are in the unfortunate situation of having to lay off some of the folks that have worked with us for the last few years on Penny’s Big Breakaway.”
This isn’t a choice we wanted to make, as they are all very talented and valued individuals. But for now, we want to do all we can to help them land on their feet.September 13, 2024
This isn’t a choice we wanted to make, as they are all very talented and valued individuals. But for now, we want to do all we can to help them land on their feet.September 13, 2024
But while reviews were generally positive, Penny’s Big Breakaway was not—at least onSteam—a breakout success. Despite a “very positive” user rating, its all-time peak concurrent player count was just 563. That’s not the whole story, as Penny’s Big Breakaway is also available on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch, but it’s not exactly indicative of a big hit, even for a singleplayer game.
Six employees isn’t a huge raw number, but it does represent a significant slice of the Evening Star team. The studio’sLinkedInpage indicates it has 11-50 employees, while thecompany websitelists 19 employees, including the six who were let go, although it says the people on the page are just “some of our team members.”
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The layoffs at Evening Star are the latest in a nearly two-year bloodbath of cuts that have rocked the game development industry:More than 16,000 developerslost their jobs through early 2024, and the situation has not gotten any better in the last six months. This week alone has seen layoffs atMicrosoft,Midnight Society, andLost Boys Interactive; last week, on September 4, Until Dawn remake developerBallistic Moonannounced that it had made “the tough decision to significantly scale down our team to secure the future of our studio,” just one month before the game’s long-awaited release on PC.
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