So it turns out that my employer did have to lay off some people in the current economic climate. In a recent post, I was remarking that it was odd seeing thousands of people being laid off from these giant tech companies while my own employer seemed to be unaffected.
While I wasn’t affected, they did decide to cancel the mobile version of the game I work on. Some of the people on that team will find new homes within the same studio or within the same company at least. We were warned though, that there probably won’t be room for everyone and some might choose to leave entirely and take a severance package.
Worse yet, they decided to shutdown the whole studio responsible for the unreleased Battlefield mobile game. That’s a whole location full just gone. I’m not sure if any of those developers are going to find places internally within the company to continue employment.
In my opinion, these layoffs happened for a different reason than what happened at Google, Meta, or Amazon. Yeah sure, money is at the root of all it but those giant companies all stated they got too big when they bet on the pandemic bump in sales or revenue was going to continue without pause. When that didn’t happen they were too heavy to continue like that. For these games, I don’t think it was a bad idea to make these games in the first place. Fundamentally, these were great IPs to be making games from. For one of these games, it was hamstrung by a business deal that benefited one of the parties but not the other. It wasn’t really that people stopped playing games.
In the end, it’s very unfortunate that some people will lose their jobs or have already lost them. Also, it’s another case of just having some bad luck. Some incredibly smart and talented people were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. A lot of them are way smarter and talented than I am but it’s just luck that I’m still standing. Layoffs rarely have to do with individual performance.
I hope everyone gets everything they deserve and need in the next few weeks.