Lords of the Fallen and Sniper: Ghost Warrior publisher CI Games has laid off 10% of its workforce, with the developers behind the games reportedly affected.
Speaking to GI.biz, CI Games said it made the job cuts "to preserve business strength and stability." Though it didn't confirm how its developers were affected directly, sources told GI.biz that Lords of the Fallen developer Hexworks was affected by the layoffs.
"To preserve business strength and stability, CI Games has made the tough but necessary decision to implement a targeted round of redundancies, affecting approximately 10% of employees across the company," said CEO Marek Tymiński.
"We would like to thank each of them for the part they’ve played during their time with us. Further business optimisations are being made to the organisation's pipelines and processes."
Lords of the Fallen arrived in October 2023 to strong critical and commercial success, earning an 8/10 in IGN's review and selling one million copies within 10 days. "Lords of the Fallen is an awesome Soulslike with a fantastic dual-realities premise, even when performance shortcomings and wimpy bosses crash the party," we said.
The layoffs at CI Games continue the wave of devastating job losses felt by the video game industry in 2023 and into 2024, with thousands of developers losing their jobs. The layoffs were among the worst in industry history, with myriad studios of all sizes affected. Dreams' Media Molecule, Cyberpunk 2077's CD Projekt Red, F1 Manager's Frontier Developments, and Assassin's Creed's Ubisoft all suffered layoffs. Destiny 2 developer Bungie was also affected, causing a "soul crushing" atmosphere at the studio, IGN learned about in an investigative report.
Colossal companies like Embracer, which owns the likes of Borderlands developer Gearbox Software and Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics, as well as Fortnite publisher Epic Games, and Dungeons & Dragons owner Hasbro also saw sweeping job losses. Embracer laid off 5% of its workforce, resulting in 904 staff let go in total, Epic laid off 16%, or 830 employees, and Hasbro cut close to 20%, meaning around 1,100 staff.
Entire studios were also closed, including Embracer's Campfire Cabal and Saints Row developer Volition Games, plus the studio behind TimeSplittlers Free Radical. More layoffs and studio closures are expected throughout 2024.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
