Ruiner devs reportedly lay off over half of studio behind cyberpunk shooter

Reikon Games, the developers behind cyberpunky top-down shooter Ruiner, have reportedly become the latest studio to lay off dozens of staff, with over half of the Polish indie said to have lost their jobs earlier this week.

Former employees speaking to Kotaku said that approximately 60 to 70 people - over 50% of the studio’s workforce - were laid off this past Tuesday, January 23rd in an announcement described as “sudden and shocking”.

Those affected included producer Rafał Basaj, who posted on Threads that around 60 people had been let go across “all possible departments”, including narrative designers, audio engineers and artists.

Reikon released neon-soaked, top-down cyberpunk action-shooter Ruiner in 2017, which has since been reported to be in line for a live-action TV series.

Last September, Reikon teased their next game, a sci-fi title with apparent themes of body augmentation. Back in 2021, the studio revealed a pacey first-person shooter under the working title of Codename: Final Form, which put players in control of the sentient robot avatar of a spaceship with a hint at time-bending elements.

Reikon’s layoffs add to a week that has seen almost two thousand people let go from Microsoft and their many studios - including Blizzard, Bethesda and Xbox - and more than 500 people lose their jobs at League of Legends makers Riot Games, along with the closure of their Riot Forge third-party publishing label. Those are just of the more recent and sizeable examples of the devastating industry layoffs that have seen an estimated 6,000 games industry workers lose their jobs and indie outlets closed entirely in under four weeks alone.