Middleton, Wisconsin native Raven Software (makers of the recently released Wolfenstein game) are supposedly firing yet another 30 to 35 workers on its development team. The Raven team, part of the bigger Activision family, is known for their great games like Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and the clawed up X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It seems that the studio was forced to let go at least 30 to 35 employees, effectively taking the studio from a 3 game at a time developer, down to a 2 game developer.
This comes immediately following release day layoffs for the Endrant Studios developer responsible for creating the Wolfenstein multiplayer part of the title, which had to let go an unannounced amount of members on the 17 man team.
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Everyone is feeling the hurt with the global economy in a huge downturn. The US is officially in a recession (as if we didn’t know that already) and looking to head towards the first depression in a very very long time. Overseas, things aren’t fairing much better. Sony announced today that the company will be cutting 8000 jobs from the electronics division in an effort to cut costs by $1.1 billion next year. The job cuts are expected to be completed by March 2010.
Kazuharu Miura, an expert electronics analyst in Tokyo, doesn’t think this will be enough, however. “The entire high-tech market is being seriously hurt,” Miura said. “Japanese companies are all in trouble because of this unexpected worldwide slowdown.”
On the gaming side of things, this current round of job cuts does not affect the PlayStation division. I repeat, Sony is not cutting jobs on the PlayStation side of the business. Will they in the future? Who knows. Either way, the economy is in piss-poor shape and a rebound is nowhere in sight.
[via Yahoo News]
Avalanche Studios has confirmed they intend to lay off 77 of their 160 employees. The lay offs are allegedly due to the fact that they have lost two major publishing contracts totaling 34 million dollars. The Just Cause developer has said that they are now going to focus more on the two remaining titles that are in the pipeline, Just Cause 2 and The Hunter.
CEO Christofer Sundberg has stated that he was uncomfortable with the size of the studio because it had become industrialized. They are now going to focus more on original intellectual properties instead of pumping out sequels like the rest of the industry. He also stated that they have no intention of letting the studio double in size again and they would like to only take on a couple of game developments at a time.
It’s always sad when companies have to trim the fat to sustain profitability but we see this so often nowadays. CEOs and the rest of the higher ups get paid a lot of extra dough to manage these companies and usually the ones who pay for it are the hard working folks making them all of that extra cash. Let this be a lesson to everyone, keep your companies small and efficient to avoid any future heartaches.
[Via Gameindustry.biz]
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