Twelve Crystal Dynamics employees have lost their jobs.
A sad reality of the game industry is that employment is frequently fluid. It’s not rare for a studio, faced with financial difficulties or a surplus of employees at the end of a project, to lay off chunks of its staff. Sadly, it’s been revealed that Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics has recently gone through this process, letting several staff go in the wake of decisions that rendered their positions “redundant”. Square Enix, which owns the studio, offered some comments to explain the move.
“We’ve made some decisions at Crystal Dynamics this week around the second project we’re working on, which has resulted in a small number of roles (roughly 12) becoming redundant as we re-scope the project,” said the publisher. “This doesn’t affect the Tomb Raider development team, who as confirmed last week are well into production on a next-generation sequel.” According to the publisher these cuts were only made because they were deemed “absolutely necessary.” The statement goes on by thanking “them for their hard work and commitment.”
There is perhaps some solace to be taken in the fact that these cuts are relatively light compared to some of the larger scale layoffs we’ve seen in the past. That being said, it always sucks to see talented people who worked hard lose their jobs. That in mind, we can’t help but wonder what sort of “re-scoping” went on to necessitate these layoffs. It’s possible, with several of its recent releases not performing as well as it had hoped, that Square Enix might be trying to shore up the costs on this latest project. Whether or not that’s the case however, is something we can’t know for sure.
Source: Kotaku
