British developer Team17 could soon find itself shockingly short-staffed as a looming round of layoffs could reportedly see the company losing roughly one-third of its employees. Known to gamers worldwide for its work on the long-running Worms series, Team17’s most recent release was the 1980s-themed horror-adventure game Killer Frequency.
Team17 could lose up to 91 employees, roughly one-third of its staff, as part of recent cuts at the company
As initially reported by Eurogamer, planned layoffs at Team17 could soon see up to 91 employees from across the company out of work. Like countless other companies across the gaming industry, Team17 has been eyeing layoffs as one way to drastically decrease its operating costs in an uncertain economic environment.
The cuts at Team17 were initially targeted at the developer’s QA teams, with plans to outsource much of their work to other companies, but have now expanded to cover departments ranging from marketing to IT and HR. While titles like the Team17-published Dredge: The Pale Reach DLC, set to release in November, should be unaffected by the layoffs, the same can’t be said for other projects currently in development at the company.
Eurogamer reports that it was contacted by multiple developers who expressed concerns that work on their upcoming games, set to be published by Team17, could be disrupted by the sweeping layoffs. Team17’s development partners were apparently left in the dark about the cuts, with one developer stating that they only found out about the layoffs when they noticed team members they’d previously been working with suddenly posting on LinkedIn trying to find new jobs. The layoffs are reportedly in response to “the release calendar this year being particularly competitive” according to some staff members, but Team17 has yet to issue an official statement on the cuts.
News of the shakeup at the Worms developer comes as companies across the gaming industry continue to downsize, with Telltale Games laying off most of its staff last week. The layoffs sweeping across the industry haven’t been limited solely to smaller studios, though.
Fortnite developer Epic Games is laying off nearly 900 employees across the organization, and both Ubisoft and Blizzard saw a similar slashing of their workforce in late September. Ostensibly a response to an uncertain economic environment that’s left developers and publishers scrambling to remain profitable, these sorts of mass layoffs could potentially have long-lasting, negative repercussions for the gaming industry as a whole that could endure for years to come.
