Outriders Dev People Can Fly Cancels Multiple Projects, Laying Off 120 Staff

Bookending the year with another round of reduncies

by Khayl Adam 3am

Polish development studio People Can Fly, best known for Outriders and Bulletstorm, is scaling back its ambitions in a major way, announcing the cancellation of multiple projects and the elimination of 120 staff positions. This follows the 30 made redundant in January, and the studio now shares the dubious honour of having gone through the wringer twice in a calendar year with Life Is Strange: Double Exposure dev, Deck Nine Games.

In a statement on X (thanks, IGN), CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski cited "external market pressures" as the primary factor and said it would suspend Project Victoria, scale down Project Bifrost, and reorganise its internal teams. In April, People Can Fly cancelled Project Dagger, which it was developing and publishing in partnership with Take-Two Interactive.

There's never a good time for layoffs, but the December ones are always the worst. Send well wishes to all those affected, and hope the industry's post-COVID overcorrection ends someday soon.

[source x.com, via ign.com]

Khayl Adam is Push Square's roving Australian correspondent, a reporter tasked with scouring the internet for the richest, most succulent PlayStation stories. With five years of experience as a freelance journalist and mercenary wordsmith, RPGs are his first great love, but strategy and tactics games are a close second, genres in which he is only too happy to specialize.

Just looking more and more like there’s a new crash incoming. There’s layoffs all throughout the industry, what, every week now? Things really aren’t looking good.

Bullet Storm was a real good time. This story is not. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Wonder if that Square Enix title they were working on got canceled or not

"Bookending the year."

For all the companies laying off pre-Christmas, how many do you think are waiting until immediately after?

Actually enjoyed outriders, had some solid foundations that a sequel could build on. Shame we'll never see it.

@LavenderShroud

There's no impending crash, there's never been so much money to be made from the industry, the problem is an increasingly small number of companies are making the majority of the money and everybody else is chasing the same thing and taking huge risks in pursuit of it to the point where its ride or die for most and inevitably most will die.

You've got your cash cow games continuously making a fortune like fortnite, gta, Fifa etc that are not going anywhere. The majority of gamers play one or several of them and either don't want, can't afford or don't have the time for anything else. That removes a huge portion of the potential audience for anything else and what's left after those gamers are removed is a much smaller pool of potential customers and far too many games vying for their limit attention.

It's upto these companies that don't have a money printing behemoth to sustain them, to be more efficient and have better long term plans. It's on them to make something new and/or original to generate interest and not just churn out clones of something that already exists. Its on them to manage budgets better. perhaps starting smaller with realistic achievable sales to survive and look to build slower instead of looking for the instant mega success. There's companies out there that have shown it can be done but greed and the desire to go after the next big thing tends to be the reason for failure.

This really sucks, this developer has created some of my best gaming memories.
Can't recommend Outriders enough, was so much fun

7
breakneck
3:55am

There are too many players in the industry sadly. On top of that you are fighting for peoples time when they're stuck in the forever games. Games like BG3 and CP2077 keep updating the game essentially becoming Forever games too.

Bulletstorm was a fantastic game.

8
trev666
5:37am

its a shame they make good games but not enough people buy them.

@breakneck this is it 100%. I have about 5 games on the go and 3 of those are really big time sinks for me especially having a full time job too. We want bigger games that reflect the £70+ entrance fee (in most cases) and I can't afford to purchase every game I want so I have to choose which ones are worth the most to me. Everybody will probably think the same way so some games are going to lose out and that means those devs are not recouping their costs. Shame about people can fly because bulletstorm is a brilliant game and I really enjoyed outriders too. I hope they find employment and wish them all the best for the future.

Painkiller was a great fps back in the day, so many secrets to find. I wish they’d remake that and start making more

I really like People Can Fly's games. They're never the greatest of all time but I've always found them to be something many other games are not - mindlessly fun, bit goofy, always enjoyable on some level. I really wish they would be finding more success but unfortunately I guess they're stuck in the Gears of War era and have never evolved.

And I guess that's why I like them. I miss the Gears of War era

12
Bramble
8:56am

People Can Fly's game are often indeed the best pallette cleansers!
As for the lay-offs, you hate to see it, but after the unbelievable growth in the games industry the past decade(s), the bubble (kinda) popped for the AAA-industry, who were all vying to make that one GaaS to bind all gamers ... It's the MMORPG-craze all over again, but with higher stakes ...
Concord was an expensive lesson for Sony, hope they step away from GaaS and focus on their storybased singleplayergame portfolio as their core

13
Oram77
10:58am

Changing their name to "people could fly", don't @ me it's purely satire.

Hopefully they haven't cancelled that rumoured PlayStation exclusive that leaked a year or so ago. The eye in the sky game.

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