Thunderful Games, the creators and publishers behind the colorful SteamWorld game series, have announced mass layoffs in the company, with 80 to 100 people losing their jobs. This is part of a “restructuring” that will see an unspecified number of game projects canceled, the company said in a statement press release Yesterday. As if that wasn’t depressing enough, they also claim that this is an intentional move that will see them create fewer of their own games and instead publish more of other developers’ work.
This is a “strategic move towards releasing games from external partners” according to CEO Martin Walfisz, who claims that it was with “great regret” that he released 80-100 people. It’s not clear from this information which departments suffered the most in the latest wave of layoffs, but judging by the language in the announcement, I’m guessing many of them were employed in development work.
“The shift in focus to external publishing will reduce the Group’s fixed costs and allow for greater flexibility,” they say, “enabling faster and more diversified game publishing by leveraging external talent and resources in a sustainable way, while retaining some internal development opportunities.”
This is not the first case of layoffs in the company this year. The first round of layoffs took place in January and resulted in the layoff of 20 percent of the company’s staff. But the company, one of largest video game companies in the world in terms of revenuehe said it wasn’t enough.
“Although significant reductions in cost levels were achieved this year, revenue targets were not achieved and the Group continues to struggle with negative cash flow.”
Negative cash flow refers to excessive investments that the company believes have been made over the past few years. Also Thunderful in May sold its distribution companies (they basically distributed Nintendo games in the Nordic countries) to plug more holes in their leaky finances.
What this means for the SteamWorld series, I don’t know. SteamWorld Heist 2 is the studio’s latest game to come out and, like all the SteamWorld games I’ve played, it was really enjoyable. When the company says it maintains “some internal development capabilities,” it may mean that it will focus exclusively on the steampunk world of robots for its own projects. While previously various studios now connected to Thunderful Development have created other games such as Lost In Random, Wavetale and The Gunk (these studios were previously known as Zoink and Image & Form).
Given vast gaming companies’ increasingly risk-taking habits in recent years, it’s possible they’re turning down non-SteamWorld projects first. But that’s just my best guess. I asked Thunderful to tell us more about which projects were rejected, and I’ll let you know if we find out.