More layoffs as Behaviour Interactive and CI Games "adjust scope" and make "optimisations"

About 20 years ago, a travel company declared this Monday just gone, the 15th, to be the most depressing day of the year. They call it Blue January. Enter yet more studio layoffs. 2023's trend continues with Dead By Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive getting rid of about 45 staff, per Kotaku, while CI Games has laid off 10% of its workforce, including from Lords Of The Fallen studio Hexworks and Sniper Ghost Warrior studio Underdog (via GI.Biz).

Some familiar statements were provided around this news. "To preserve business strength and stability, CI Games has made the tough but necessary decision to implement a targeted round of redundancies, affecting approximately 10% of employees across the company. We would like to thank each of them for the part they’ve played during their time with us. Further business optimisations are being made to the organisation's pipelines and processes," CI Games's CEO Marek Tymiński told GI.Biz.

According to the source GI.Biz spoke to, as well as some posts on LinkedIn, the majority of layoffs were in marketing, though Hexworks and Underdog were also affected.

Behaviour Interactive, meanwhile, gave a statement to Kotaku. "Recently, changing market conditions necessitated adjusting the scope of several Behaviour projects. In these situations, our preference is always to reassign talent to other projects. Unfortunately, this option is not always available to us," it says - though the statement also notes that the departues "represented less than 3% of our total workfoce", which is surely of some comfort to those affect. For comparison, CI Games' layoffs probably total 15-20 people, again estimated by Kotaku.

It's the same sort of statements we always get around layoffs. Earlier this week Thunderful announced they're shitcanning a whopping 20% of their staff, Twitch recently redundanced 500, and as a lovely Christmas present TinyBuild immolated the entirity of Versus Evil on December 22nd last year. The layoffs will continue until morale improves etc etc.

Our layoffs tag was first used in 2012. 40% of articles tagged with it are from the last nine months. There are a bunch of things that could contribute to that stat, though, so here are some other numbers for you: GDC released its 2024 State Of The Game survey ahead of this year's conference, and 35% of the over 3000 respondents have been affected by layoffs. More than half (56%) are worried their company could see layoffs in the next year. But some good news from that survey is that 72% of younger developers (aged 18-24) are in favour of unionisation. Get 'em.