Gaming – Layoffs everywhere

It’s been a week of bad news in the gaming world, so lets get through this together.

Zynga laid off 5% of their staff this week in an attempt to shore up their bottom line. They closed a Boston office, reduced staff in Austin and have proposed shutting down shops in the UK and Japan. They’re sunsetting 13 games and cutting down investment in their title The Ville (a game that is the subject of legal action from EA who claims it copies EA’s The Sims Social). Learn more at Huffington Post.

I’m not a fan of Zynga’s practice of cloning successful games but it’s always a bummer to hear about people losing their jobs. But it wasn’t only Zynga.

Bigpoint, a developer of ‘free to play’ online games including Battlestar Galactica Online, cut 120 jobs earlier this week. Forty of these were from their San Francisco office and the rest were in Hamburg. The company has found “that developing games in the US is not really the most efficient way for us at the moment,” according to Bigpoint CEO Heiko Hubertz. In Hamburg most of the cuts were administrative staff. Hubertz himself is stepping down from his CEO role but claims the decision isn’t related to the job cuts. Gamesindustry.biz has more on this story.

Last layoff story for this week, I promise. Turbine Entertainment (Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online) also saw layoffs, though at the time of this writing it wasn’t clear how many people were affected. Turbine employs, or employed, 400 people in its Boston area offices. Boston.com has a few more details.

In my circles, the infatuation with Kickstarter-funded games is starting to wane a bit. I’m not sure if we’re typical or the lunatic fringe but several of us have decided to cut back on funding these projects because so many of them seem to struggle to make deadlines. Our concerns were reinforced by the story of Haunts, a project that was successfully funded a few months ago. This week Rick Dakan, the project lead for Haunts, had to share the news that his company was out of money and his programmers had left the project. Essentially progress on the game had come to a halt. The good news is that while things are still developing, the story may have a happy ending; it looks like the game development community may pull together to help finish the game. Joystiq interviewed Dakan — who refers to himself as “the new poster boy for Kickstarter cautionary tales” — and has a great post about the fall and potential rise of Haunts. Well worth reading…

Choosen excerpts by JMM from

via Gaming update: Layoffs everywhere, MOGA controller woes and A Game of Dwarves | ITworld.