People Can Fly, which made games such as Bulletstorm, Gears of War: Judgment and Outriders, has announced that more than 120 of its 700 employees will be laid off due to «external market pressures». What will happen to the studio’s projects?
People Can Fly, which made games such as Bulletstorm, Gears of War: Judgment and Outriders, has announced that more than 120 of its 700 employees will be laid off due to «external market pressures». What will happen to the studio’s projects?
People Can Fly CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski said the layoffs are the result of a change in the studio’s self-publishing strategy, which includes suspending Project Victoria, reducing the team working on Project Bifrost, and «restructuring some of our support teams.» This is reported by PC Gamer.
«The video game market is still evolving and we have to adapt to what is happening today. We are redoubling our efforts with new recruiting projects and focusing on developing one independent game», — Wojciechowski said.
He added that the studio needs to «adapt our plans to our financial capabilities.» People Can Fly’s website says the studio has more than 700 employees, presumably before layoffs.
Neither Project Victoria nor Bifrost were officially announced, but People Can Fly had been in the works for at least two years. The studio mentioned these games when it announced the end of its publishing deal with Take-Two Interactive in 2022, when it said it would self-publish both games. Things haven’t been going well for her, with Project Dagger, which she’s been developing in partnership with Take-Two since 2020, running into problems in 2023 and eventually shutting down earlier this year.
Last winter, Sony announced that it was laying off about 900 employees at its PlayStation division. The layoffs will affect multiple PlayStation studios, including Insomniac Games, Naughty Dog, Guerrilla Games and Firesprite.
In the spring of 2024, it became known that the Ukrainian game industry is also experiencing a reduction. In the Ukrainian market’s top 25 game development companies, the number of employees decreased by 1,020 people (or 11,75%) in half a year, and by 1,411 (almost 15%) in a year. The number of technical specialists decreased by 590 and 944, respectively.
