Did You Enjoy Split/Second? Well, You Won't Be Playing Another One.

The news follows overnight rumours of around 40 lay-offs at the studio behind Split/Second. An anonymous tipsters later clarified that the redundancies were likely to be in the hundreds.

“Disney Interactive Studios confirms a reduction of its workforce from its Brighton-based internal game development studio, Black Rock Studios. The studio will continue its work on its current project,” said Disney Interactive in a statement this morning.

Eurogamer reported last night that much of the Black Rock team had been sitting on their hands since mid-December.

"It seems Disney have been unable to provide us with a project to work on, and our concept pitches clearly haven't gone down well (despite there being many of them)," an anonymous source told the website.

Apparently sequels to off-road racer Pure and destructive racer Split/Second had both been cancelled.

"After SS wrapped, we started work on SS2 pre-prod which was cancelled last December due to DIS's new management and their changing priorities (the push towards freemium etc) - SS2 didn't really fit in with that (despite some efforts to shoehorn it in).

"We had a concept week (everyone in the studio working on small teams) to try to come up with new ideas, but nothing really stuck. We had a freemium week sometime later with similar goals too.

"The inactive portion of the studio has been expecting redundancies for months, so this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's sad that it's come to this of course, but for many people they'll be quite happy to take the money and go, as they've been sitting around doing nothing for months."

The anonymous source did add that some Black Rock employees were still actively working on a "promising" title, but added that it is "new and risky, so I imagine [Disney] don't want to risk putting two teams on it."