MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Mobile developer Endless Entertainment – which worked with NBC Universal on the mobile game Series: Your Story Universe, has laid off a handful of developers from both its California and New York offices. Some of the affected personnel had only been at the studio a few months.
Endless confirmed the redundancies to Gamasutra, insisting the layoffs were the result of “a slowing development cycle”.
“Today, Endless said a sad goodbye to seven talented team members and wonderful human beings. The change had nothing to do with their work performance. It’s simply an unfortunate reality of a slow-down in our current development cycle,” said a statement from Endless Entertainment CEO Michael Fox.
“We would love to work with all of them again in the future and are doing our best to help find new employment for them as soon as possible.”
These latest layoffs sadly come on the back of several other closures and cutbacks we’ve seen across studios in recent months, most recently at Amazon and PayDay developer Starbreeze. In a brief statement on the latter 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.
Amazon laid off “dozens” of employees from its Amazon Game Studios after shutting down multiple “unannounced projects”. Staff were told last month 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 how many staff are affected by the changes.
Other recent 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.
