Layoffs Hit Until Dawn, Dark Pictures Dev Supermassive Games, 90 People Affected

If someone were to create a new studio rn, they’d have their pick of the litter.

sounds to me like they got a game cancelled

I truly don't see how games can be made in this environment when large swaths of staff are removed. Doesn't this just prolong the development time? Are we looking at games now taking even longer to release?

Maybe Ballistic Moon will pick up a few employees

The industry has become fat and lazy.

I say this as a fat and lazy person myself.

A gaming industry collapse is so overdue.

Very sorry to hear that, but can't say that I'm surprised. Can't remembered the last hit they had. Hope their next games does well.

This doesn’t come as a surprise to me, Bandai just released their financials for the quarter and said they had canceled five projects if I remember correctly. My guess is the second set of the Dark Pictures anthology titles got the chop. They really haven’t had much success with the series, it’s not regarded very highly like Until Dawn.

I think these companies are more and more setting themselves up for AI. They're getting rid of staff now to automate jobs.

Can't help but wonder as much as these industry wide layoffs are to keep beancounters in Accounts happy for their next shareholder meetings if there's also been a "next big thing" uptake in tinkering with A.I. development tools?

With the tendency of AAA production tending to play it safe title to title,it must be awfully tempting for upper management of these devs/publishers to see what they might get away with A.I. doing the work & any tidy up being done by those that still work there or external (cheap) contractors.

Insert Day one Pikachu surprise face on twitter for next release & "we had no idea our new game fell short of yours & ours expectations"🙄🤔

What is the logic of telling "150 of them that they are "at risk" of being the 90 people who will soon lose their job"?

In whose mind is it better to traumatise 150 employees by telling them they're all at risk, so they can anxiously bite their nails, instead of deciding first who the 90 are going to be and immediately telling them? Surely that would be more humane and less damaging to the morale of the company.

Even with the Bloomberg article breaking the news early, I can't fathom why they would decide to issue this warning to their staff if they really have their best interests at heart, though the cynic in me can't help but wonder if there's an added bonus of squeezing extra work out of them in their final days by having them all scramble to prove themselves more irreplaceable than each other in some twisted 'lord of the flies' performance.

Seriously, can anyone who works in this field enlighten me as to what their logic is?

😢 One of my favourite developers.

@Robocod probably not the bean counters in accounts more likely shareholders/owners of the company.

Until Dawn and The Quarry were absolute gems. The other stories delved into hallucinations, prehistoric CHUDs or just crazy people. Stick with supernatural, known monsters. Try staying away from polarizing events like wars, schizophrenia and hallucinogenic gas that hadn’t dissipated in 50 years.

If only Switchback VR would have been better at launch as early reviews killed it. A Rush of Blood VR2 port would have been a day 1 for me as well.

90 out of 300ish is quite a bit more than the 8-12% trend of other recent layoffs. This is a pretty substantial restructure compared to other companies.

I like their games. They capture the campy horror vibe that I love.

@AK4tywill the logic is compliance with UK employment law - when making redundancies you don't fire people, you say a certain number of roles are no longer required, then there is a process of consultation where you need to announce like this and then make a final selection of who leaves at the end of that process. Having been through it myself in another industry, it is approximately as awful as you describe but it's not unique to this business nor this industry, it's how the UK works

@JAMes-BroWWWn
Game Pass is doing its part!

Maybe their next game should be about the current state of the game industry. That's true horror.

I always think that if CEO’s and the higher execs make these decisions to cut costs, then they should also be taking a huge pay cut & absolving themselves of any bonuses or payouts for the next 5 years.
It shows their failure as leaders to perform & an incompetence to come up with the creative solutions they’re paid for. Not just the lazy (cut x percent of staff to save costs or increase profits for the shareholders).

I know it’s not always that simple, but a lot of these measures are just to make the books look good

What a Shame. I really like their games as well. Especially the quarry but love the slightly jank of the dark pictures games

@AK4tywill @NeuralDeclan Yep. That's how it happens here in the UK. I work in HR and it's a horrible thing to be involved in from either side.

I can't wait for an article saying "noone was fired in the gaming industry this month".

Unfortunate. They are working on Little Nightmares 3 and probably another Dark Pictures game right? Taiser aren't working on it but Bandai wants another one I guess.

Starting new studios seems to be a bit and miss.

It offers more for the staff if they can get it off the ground but if they repeat what they were doing, expect another big publisher to find them it also shows their stupidity.

Or audiences expectations are also the problem.

Aveum was a great example. (Judas maybe, Caliato did too, Yooka, Bloodstained and ma y others have gone to some success in some areas audiences are willing to not be difficult I mean do) Indies are making military multiplayer games, AAA are. Bright Memory Infinite is a SciFi hack n slash shooter by 1 person even if short it's great at what it does. Anomalies exist but not for AAA Indie vets wanting big production budgets.

Regardless of how it turned out of 720p, of theming which audiences are too brain dead for. For those wanting new can support them all day but most audiences want formulaic games, any foot step into something different even if a theme not just oh a Fantasy looter shooter.

We can have a small audience be into new things but unless the younger people care or old want to step out of their comfort the industry is done for.

I can be a gaming history fan and open to new ideas, old ideas with a spin all day, doesn't change anything. I give suggestions on why I think a game sucks with Foamstars and Biomutant. Or just hate them and leave it at that.

Audiences are dumb. In racing it has to be a sim because oh cars have to be and audiences are idiots on how good arcade ones were but cars have to have real physics and real graphics, real sounds and stupid tyre focus. Who cares.

I don't care how much their wheel rig is. Give me quality games not audience dream car/realism trash and business model milking.

Companies set expectations and audiences eat up garbage and creativity but it depends on the size of them.

Indie platformers, nostalgia garbage. I don't want more Banjo, Sonic Adventure , Spyro, Crash and Mario 64 clones. Give me something else.

There is a reason going 5-7th gen has made me go oh these are great ideas, too bad no one cares because audiences and Indie devs want to fangame level trash, from their hit nostalgic games their narrow minds focus on. Or anything different just refinements. Boring.

Hardline and others made me go oh we have that many third person shooters with eh themes, a key mechanic and their all cover based.

You can have a cops and robbers, you can have any setting but we had so much garbage during then.

The industry is messing itself up but casual audiences and many gamers are to blame for what IPs, what themes, what expectations then the small percentage of us open to many types of games saying we want others to be out there and not mimic real life and be the same thing for 10-20+ years and being boring wastes of time productions or audiences get bored and no one but few start a trend.

Then it gets oversaturated very quickly these days. Or too long of production and thinking it will 1 up the other when it's been 5 years and trends move fast.

Only people into old trends will pick them up sometimes.

I could go on about Biomutant and Foamstars, Indie platformers trash ideas then 5-7th gen being better, same with racing or other games pathetic ideas/safeness all day but I won't.

I wish the staff the best, very unfortunate times for devs to get cut off because of financial reasons and higher ups won't take a cut themselves or offer better management.

Noooooo!!! Sony, rescue this studio and make more games like Until Dawn!!

They're also working on Little Nightmares 3. 3 Big games due to launch soon and losing almost a third of the workforce can't possibly be good.

@TheCollector316 lol I Played the Quarry on PS+. So yeah subs definitely hurt the game.

Also there was a recent story about how SuperMassive burnt bridges with Sony despite Sony actually wanting an Until Dawn 2. I think that's why they're looking at Ballistic Moon for the remake.

@breakneck
Oh that's a shame about the burned bridges.

i wish sony purchased them. i feel like they made a good team with sony , but since they started multiplatform games they got worse with a few decent ones.

@TheCollector316 Yeah the rumour is a lot of the talent left because they weren't happy with the higher ups decisions that made them fall out with Sony, so the people that left set up their own studio called Ballistic moon and partnered with Sony. That's how they are doing the until dawn remake.

@Zenos I really enjoy them but the performance of their games is terrible

@__jamiie @NeuralDeclan I'm sorry you had to be involved in that on either side. What is the thinking behind this law and what does it help prevent? I imagine it's vaguely within the realms of transparency and fairness but it seems so unnecessarily cruel.

@AK4tywill the collective consultation process is nominally to ensure fairness, as you say. The employer says why they're cutting the roles, and how they will select who leaves so they can't just fire people they don't like or who are "too expensive", you have to be both truly unnecessary and score lower than the other employees at risk.

At this point employee reps or unions can discuss with the employer about whether redundancy is necessary or not before it happens (in my experience this is lip service and nothing changes). You as employees can sometimes have input into the scoring framework for who is made redundant.

From a practical point of view, this period also allows the employees to look for a new job while still employed in case they get cut.

@NeuralDeclan @AK4tywill This. 👆