DOU’s sources report that more than 100 video game developers may lose their jobs due to the decision of the American gaming company Big Fish Games to terminate the contract with Ukrainian studios.
DOU’s sources report that more than 100 video game developers may lose their jobs due to the decision of the American gaming company Big Fish Games to terminate the contract with Ukrainian studios.
According to an anonymous employee of one of the studios, each could lose up to 60 employees due to contract termination. The reason was the sale of Big Fish Games to parent company Aristocrat Digital.
«The buyers seem to be drastically changing their strategy with game releases. They may be making an in-house HOPA games studio instead of essentially outsourcing to other companies. With the change in strategy, they have abruptly stopped the contract with GrandMA and, as far as I know, with Friendly Fox,» the insider noted.
According to him, GrandMA Studios and Friendly Fox Studio were «heavily dependent on the publisher» and had no income or projects of their own. After the termination of the contracts, employees were paid their salaries in full, but without bonuses.
Friendly Fox is a game company specializing in developing games for Mobile / PC / Mac in the HOPA (hidden object puzzle adventure) genre. Over the past 12 years, they have created over 50 projects.
GrandMA Studios was founded in 2011 and has worked on over 40 games in the HOPA genre. The company noted that some of its projects have ranked first in publisher Big Fish’s Top 100.
dev.ua reached out to Ukrainian studios for comment and received a response from Friendly Fox on December 12.
«We assume that the comments were received from a representative of another studio, and definitely not from a representative of Friendly Fox Studio. And, unfortunately, the assumptions and conjectures about Friendly Fox Studio only caused us reputational damage,» said the company’s representative Maria Kolomiets.
She emphasized that Friendly Fox Studio is a separate company that collaborated with Big Fish Games «as part of the PC development.»
«Currently, our company continues its operations,» Friendly Fox noted.
