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It’s been a pretty brutal week for the game industry in terms of layoffs. Just in the past few days, League of Legends developers Riot Games laid off 530 team members, and on Thursday, Microsoft’s gaming division cut 1,900 jobs across its Xbox, ZeniMax Media, and Activision Blizzard teams.
Unfortunately, there were also some other layoffs at a number of different game developers this week that affected a large percentage of people in those teams. One was at People Can Fly, the Poland-based team that has developed games like Gears of War: Judgement, Bulletstorm, and more recently, Outriders.
Kotaku (via VGC) reported that 30 team members who were working on “Project Gemini” had been laid off. Another 20 team members who were also working on that game were pulled off the project but will be assigned to work on other upcoming games for the developer. As a consequence, “Project Gemini’s” campaign and the number of enemies in that game will reportedly be cut down.
Another report from Kotaku stated that Black Forest Games, owned by the Embracer Group, cut half of its team members this week. The Germany-based studio reportedly had 100 team members before this week’s layoffs. It has released two full remakes of games in the Destroy All Humans! series. It is currently working on a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game based on The Last Ronin comics.
Yet another game development studio, Reikon Games, reportedly cut as many as 80 percent of its team members this week, according to Kotaku. The team’s last game was the 2017 action title Ruiner. Since at least 2021, it has been working on a sci-fi shooter called Final Form. There’s no word on the current status of the game.
Kotaku has been keeping track of all the January 2024 layoff announcements in the game industry. So far this month, the site claims a total of 5,959 game developers have been, or soon will be, affected by layoff notices.
