Cuts needed to ensure “a stable and sustainable future for the company”
Just Causecreators,Mad Maxdevelopers andRage 2co-developers Avalanche Studios have announced that they will lay off 50 developers - nine per cent of their global workforce - and close their New York, USA and Montreal, Canada studios in order to “ensure a stable and sustainable future for the company”.
Theannouncement postdoesn’t go into much detail about either the reasons for the layoffs or how exactly Avalanche will be supporting the departing staff, adding only that “our focus is now on supporting all Avalanchers through this challenging time” and that “we’re grateful for the invaluable contributions of those leaving and remain committed to creating incredible gaming experiences for our players.”
The studio closures fit a larger pattern of games industry mass layoffs over the past year or two that have been widely attributed to a mixture of “overambitious” expansion during the lockdown gaming boom, technological innovations/gimmicks such as NFTs not paying off, general economic upheaval, and a desire for returns on investment that are increasingly hard to square with the sheer expense of developing a blockbuster videogame.
That’s a very compressed summary that doesn’t take into account how circumstances may vary between studios - Avalanche are not Microsoft, for example, who started the year bylaying off almost 2000 peopleafter spending $68.7 billion on the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. As Alice B wrote at the time, “shrinking headcount is often one of the first things a business does when it has eaten a smaller, weaker one.”
You can read more about the gutting of the games industry inmy feature from this year’s GDC.
