More than 300 game developers lost their jobs in one day, just three weeks before Christmas
It's another miserable day for the videogame industry, as the past 24 hours have seen hundreds of people put out of work at Ubisoft, Torn Banner, and Sweet Bandits.
In terms of raw numbers, the Ubisoft layoffs are the deepest cuts. The decision to end development of the free-to-play shooter XDefiant, coming less than three months after executive producer Mark Rubin insisted "the game is absolutely not dying," means the closure of Ubisoft's San Francisco and Osaka studios (although Ubisoft's San Francisco business office remains open), and a "ramp down" of the company's studio in Sydney. A total of 277 people are expected to lose their jobs: 143 from the San Francisco studio, and another 134 "likely to depart" from Osaka and Sydney.
Sweet Bandits, the developer of vintage spycraft extraction shooter Deceive Inc, has closed outright. "There is no easy way to say this: The Sweet Bandits team is no more," the studio announced in a message on the Deceive Inc forums. "After a long and difficult road of trying to get Deceive inc. in a state where it could thrive, we have reached the breaking point for the studio, unable to continue this adventure with you."
Sweet Bandits said it is "considering options" for the future of the game, which will be handled by publisher Tripwire Interactive, and for now the servers will continue uninterrupted. The number of people now heading into the holiday season without jobs wasn't revealed, but the studio's website says it had 18 employees.
It is with a heavy heart that we have to announce the closure of Sweet Bandits.Please read more information below.https://t.co/tVJF2N2rXsDecember 3, 2024
Torn Banner Studios, best known as the developer of the Chivalry games, also made "the very difficult decision to undergo a restructure and reduce some of our talented workforce," CEO Steve Piggot said in a message posted to LinkedIn. Piggot didn't say how many people were let go, but senior 3D artist Andrew Waddingham said "many" employees were put out of work, while character artist Matheus Paiva described it as a "mass layoff." Torn Banner's website says it had more than 150 employees prior to the layoffs.
While Chivalry 2 was a success, it never put up massive player numbers, and received its final update in May 2024. No More Room in Hell 2, Torn Banner's current project, has struggled: Its early access launch in October was plagued with bugs and server problems, and the average concurrent player count sagged to just a few hundred almost immediately. Piggot said the studio remains "fully committed" to a 1.0 launch in 2025.
These layoffs are the latest in a decimation of the videogame industry that's been ongoing for the past two years: 2023 was a brutal year for layoffs and 2024 has been even worse, according to the public Game Industry Layoffs tracker hosted by Obsidian Publishing, which estimates that 14,000 people have been put out of work so far. The timing of these latest cuts is especially ugly, coming just weeks before the holiday season, but it's far from a sudden uptick: November saw layoffs at studios including Thunderful, Humanoid Origin, Reflector Entertainment, and Worlds Untold.