Glixel team laid off by Wenner Media

The staff of Wenner Media’s video games spin-off Glixel have been laid off and their San Francisco office closed.

Games Industry reports that the Rolling Stone publisher closed the doors late last week, with general manager John Davison and content director Simon Cox among those to have lost their jobs.

"Sadly Rolling Stone couldn’t make a remote office in SF work for them and struggled to give us the support and attention we needed to really grow,” Cox said on social media. No harm, no foul."

Davison added: "It’s taken a couple of days for this to properly sink in, but sadly on Thursday this week we closed the San Francisco Glixel.com office. I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved over the past year and a half. We set out to build something with a clear vision that covered games differently: by making it about people rather than just product.

"Thanks to the Herculean efforts of Simon Cox, Miguel Lopez, Rachel Weber, Paul Justin Encinas and Stacy Cohen along with our growing roster of incredibly talented writers, I think we really proved that there’s huge potential in that. There has been some truly amazing stuff.

"What we started isn’t going away, but the future of it will now continue from the Rolling Stone office in New York without us."

Glixel started life in mid 2016 when it first appeared on the culture tab on the Rolling Stone website. It was spun off into its own entity in late last year.

Gus Wenner said when announcing Glixel in May 2016: "Gaming just felt like an area where there was a great audience opportunity, a great revenue opportunity and a major void that we could fill with capabilities we had in-house."