It just never ends, does it? Publisher Square Enix is making ‘mass layoffs’ per a new report from the fantastic Rebekah Valentine over at IGN, and additional reporting from VGC. This comes after today’s earlier release of Square Enix’s detailed progress report, that goes into their medium term business plans, in addition to their ‘3-year reboot for long term growth’ – and the clues were in there all along.
Per IGN’s report, Square Enix is making layoffs that will potentially impact ‘over 100 individuals’. This conincides with a their additional plans for the consolidation of the publishing organisation, as detailed in the report seen earlier today.
These changes, like many gaming publishers nowadays use terms like ‘lean’ and ‘agile’, which usually translates for employees as ‘do more with less. Square Enix calculate annual cost savings of over 3 Billion Yen, and per Square Enix, “a decision was made to close overseas development studios and shift toward consolidating development functions in Japan.”
In many ways, Square Enix have already done most of this, selling many of its Western-based development teams to other organisations – Crystal Dynamics, SE Montreal and Eidos Montreal.
Over at VGC, Andy Robinson reports that while no headcount figures were shared during the call, one person in Europe told VGC “nearly 140 people were told they were “at risk” in the London office alone.“.
How do you feel about layoffs in the video game industry? Let us know in the XboxEra Forums or make some noise in the lively XboxEra Community Discord Server. If you’re looking to be a bigger part of an amazing community, then either choice is a good one!
Support Our Team
XboxEra is a community-first, community funded publication. If you value what we do, and want to have a direct say in what we cover, consider supporting us directly on Patreon.
All you need to do is head on over to patreon.com/xboxera and for less than a cup of coffee a month, you’ll help keep this publication alive. As a bonus, you’ll find that we create more content than many other Patreon supported publications, and we give more back in return.
So go on, do something awesome.
