MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Amazon has reportedly laid off “dozens” of employees from its Amazon Game Studios after shutting down multiple “unannounced projects”. Kotaku reports staff were told on Friday that they had 60 days to find alternative employment in the company and those unable to find alternative work in that time would receive severance packages.
Amazon – which established its Game Studios in 2012 – would not confirm to Kotaku how many staff are affected by the changes.
“Amazon Game Studios is reorganizing some of our teams to allow us to prioritize development of New World, Crucible, and new unannounced projects we’re excited to reveal in the future,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “These moves are the result of regular business planning cycles where we align resources to match evolving, long-range priorities.
“We’re working closely with all employees affected by these changes to assist them in finding new roles within Amazon. Amazon is deeply committed to games and continues to invest heavily in Amazon Game Studios, Twitch, Twitch Prime, AWS, our retail businesses, and other areas within Amazon.”
These latest layoffs sadly come on the back of several other closures and cutbacks we’ve seen across studios in recent months, most recently PayDay developer Starbreeze. In a brief statement on the company’s official website, the firm said it had decided to make organisational changes “in order to make the organization more efficient and reduce costs”, resulting in 60 redundancies – primarily from its Stockholm office – by November 2019. This would see the company shed a quarter of its 240 staff as it fights to remain solvent.
Other layoffs and closures include Iron Tiger Studios, ArenaNet, Next Games, Forgotten Key, Define Human Studios, Bandai Namco Vancouver, and Trion Worlds. Telltale Games also laid off its staff in a studio closure back in September.
