Two more studios announce layoffs as 2024 continues to suck for game developers

Gaming IndustryTwo more studios announce layoffs as 2024 continues to suck for game developersWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: CI Games / Hexworks)

Pieta, a boss from the upcoming Lords of the Fallen game, levels a glowing blade menacingly at the player.

The CI Games layoffs reportedly came largely at the expense of the company’s marketing team, although aGamesIndustryreport says its Hexworks and Underdog internal studios were also affected. CI Games CEO Marek Tymiński later confirmed the report, saying: “To preserve business strength and stability, CI Games has made the tough but necessary decision to implement a targeted round of redundancies, affecting approximately 10% of employees across the company.”

“We would like to thank each of them for the part they’ve played during their time with us,” Tymiński said. “Further business optimisations are being made to the organisation’s pipelines and processes.”

“Recently, changing market conditions necessitated adjusting the scope of several Behaviour projects,” a studio rep said. “In these situations, our preference is always to reassign talent to other projects. Unfortunately, this option is not always available to us. These departures represented less than 3% of our total workforce.” The rep later added that a total of 40 employees were let go.

Both sets of layoff are part of a broader pattern of cuts across the game industry that dominated headlines through 2023 and have carried on unabated in 2024: The first half of January has already seen layoffs atBossa Studios,Unity,Twitch,Discord, andLost Boys Interactive. Layoffs are an unfortunate but not unusual part of the business, and as unfair as it is the reduction as CI Games could be seen in that light: A studio reducing staff following the release of a new game, successful or not, is not atypical.

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The pattern of layoffs plaguing the game industry has been largely attributed to overly-aggressive expansion during the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic that executives have now decided is no longer sustainable: Unity and Discord, for instance, both referenced a need for increased “agility” during their recent rounds of layoffs, while Twitch CEO Daniel Clancy said last week that the company is “still meaningfully larger than it needs to be” while announcing that more than 500 employees were being let go—on top of the more than 400 that had beenlaid off in March 2023.

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Lords of the Fallen studio embraces fear of the DEI boogeyman, says it will not include ‘any social or political agendas’ in its games

Tim Sweeney

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