Firaxis Games Streamlines Twenty People Away
It's always a sad day when we have to report on relatively successful developers and designers being laid off within gaming studios. However, it would be doing them a disservice not to mention their recent change in employment level, so here goes.
After getting a tip on these layoffs, Kotaku contacted a 2K Games representative who went on to "confirm that Firaxis has realigned its development resources in order to streamline its development process, reduce costs and maximize the overall performance the studio. This will result in the elimination of approximately 20 positions."
Recently, Firaxis have been putting the finishing touches on Civilization V, about which has had this gamer excited since February. It's not hard to imagine that - as the game's assets and initial designs become complete, some jobs may start to be redundant within any studio which just focuses on a single release every year or so. Especially while under the watchful eye of a larger entity like 2K Games and its shareholders, it's tough to get away with the indie mentality of keeping all those art guys for a while after they're done and the game's shipped.
The weird part showing up in this story is that it's not just artists or QA finishers who are getting the pinkslips, but a whole cross-section within Firaxis: UI artists, animators, programmers, designers... it's hard to imagine downsizing the entire operation unless the quarterly reports need help or they just hired too many folks to begin with.
The LinkedIn profile for Firaxis shows their current count at just under 100 employees, which means as much as 20% of the overall staff may have been reduced. If the PR director from 2K Games is to be believed, however, it won't hurt the production of Civ V. So it's good that he said that, at least!
We wish the best for the ~20 former employees of Firaxis, and hope they'll land secure jobs again soon.
faePuck
Posted to Video Games on 9 July 2010
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: 2k games, civilization v, economic recession, firaxis games, layoffs, pc
Civilization 5 is going to make 2K hundreds of millions of dollars. It is going to sell at least ten million copies, if not more. Surely they can afford to keep most of those people on until the recession is over. This is the state of American labor. They expect you to work more for less while the corporations rake in the cash. At the very least, they could hold onto these people until the economy gets better. I feel horrible for these people, as the economy is about to hit another dip. Even Paul Krugman is predicting that it will turn into a depression. Shame on 2K and Firaxis.