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Telltale Games confirm huge layoffs and “majority studio closure”
Following yesterday's initial reports that Telltale Games were effectively shutting down, the studio behind licensed story 'em ups including The Walking Dead and Batman: The Enemy Within have confirmed the bad news. All but 25 Telltale employees have been let go (that's 250-ish people gone, former members report), cut down to a skeleton crew to "fulfil the company's obligations to its board and partners." The…
Following a difficult year, Sunless Sea and Fallen London devs Failbetter have battened down the hatches and scaled back some of their plans, including laying off several members of staff and delaying Sunless Skies. Part of the problem is early access sales of the encounter-unspeakable-cosmic-horrors-then-eat-your-crew space survive-o-exploration RPG sequel have been lower than expected. The small English studio assure that they will finish Sunless Skies…
Torchlight studio Runic shut down, Gigantic devs also almost closed
The owners of Torchlight developers Runic Games, the Chinese free-to-play-focused publisher Perfect World Entertainment, confirmed today that it has shut down Runic's Seattle studio. Seeing as that's Runic's only studio, er, that's them basically gone - though their games will live on. This comes barely one month after Runic released Hob. Perfect World have also laid off most the team at Motiga, the studio behind…
Less than one fortnight after Square Enix announced they were ditching IO Interactive, IO have announced a round of layoffs. While that's no surprise, it is certainly a shame. We still don't know what the future holds for the Danish studio, who are best known for their Hitman games, and the path forward is looking bumpy. Squeenix had said they'd try to find new investors…
Scribblenauts developers 5th Cell have laid off 45 employees but, contrary to initial reports, the company say they're not closing down. 5th Cell had been working on a new mobile version of Scribblenauts, their series about solving free-form puzzles by drawing almost anything into existence, but its surprise cancellation left them overstaffed. The situation's a bit unclear at this point, but they had also been…
Toll the Bell of Lost Souls. Full Control, the folks most recently behind Space Hulk Ascension and Jagged Alliance Flashback, has stopped making games. The Danish studio ran into financial trouble and will soon only exist as a far smaller company selling and supporting their games. Current plans for DLC, updates, and ports are still in effect, but it's unclear how much we'll see from…
At this rate, Trion Worlds might soon be forced to change its name to Trion Islands, or maybe Trion Small Yet Charming Spanish Getaway Vacation Villa. After the Rift team got hit by a major round of layoffs late last year, Defiance's band of trigger finger scratchers has taken a possibly even bigger hit. While the exact number is unconfirmed, many reports place the total…
Too often, I wonder if the gaming industry shouldn't just switch over to producing new versions of musical chairs and duck-duck-goose full-time. It does, after all, seem to be what we're best at. Projects wrap, publishers "restructure," and the unemployment line has to change the hinges on its revolving door. Again. This year, especially, has been viciously unkind on the layoff and closures front, and…
Activision has promised to stop making terrible games. Well, okay, that's not quite true. But they've said to Kotaku that this year they're planning to release "fewer games based on license properties", which is publisher speak for, "Good lord, that James Bond game was terrible." This coincides with the announcement that the company is laying off 30 employees, thought to affect CODBLOPS developers, Treyarch.
Gabe Newell has told Engadget that, despite the speculation (including our own) that a hardware project may have been cancelled, that Valve haven't cancelled any ongoing projects at all, and that's the the reason behind their having let some staff go. He added, "We're not going to discuss why anyone in particular is or isn't working here."
"Will it ever actually come out, though?" is a question that's often asked of many Kickstarter-funded games, but not like this. In the blink of an eye, Gas Powered Games' Wildman went from fossil-fueled hopeful to dinosaur with a very large meteor breathing down its neck. After 40-some-odd layoffs, Chris Taylor was left reconsidering if it was even worthwhile to gamble the rest of his…
Right then, let me try laying this one out on paper, because I'm still having a hard time comprehending it. So, a few days ago, Chris Taylor and Gas Powered Games announced a rather massive Kickstarter. Wildman, they said, would need $1.1 million in its tank before it could get off the ground, but they had it all planned out. So we got some gameplay…
In modern society, we tend to throw around the phrase "worst day ever" pretty loosely. Stubbed your toe? Worst day ever. Forgot to have "the help" restock your yacht with perfectly chilled bottles of imported Mars water? Worst day ever. Looked on helplessly as you and nearly 250 other talented individuals in your line of work suddenly found yourselves jobless? OK, now we're getting somewhere.…
As we know, random events segregate 'non-randomly', and things bunching together isn't a trend. But it's still pretty chilling to see so many lay-offs in the games industry all at once. So we express our sympathies and best wishes to those at Funcom, PopCap, and THQ who've found out their jobs are no longer in the last few hours.
