UK-based Bossa Studios, the developer of video games together with Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread, and I Am Fish, has confirmed the layoff of 19 folks on the finish of 2023. In keeping with a GamesIndustry report, the cuts characterize roughly one-third of Bossa’s whole variety of workers.
The layoffs passed off on the finish of 2023, and have been made primarily amongst QA and manufacturing workers, and workers exterior the UK. Bossa Studios co-founder Henrique Olifiers advised the positioning that the layoffs have been pressured by a “excellent storm of occasions” main as much as the top of 2023, together with the big variety of big-budget video games that launched within the closing quarter of the yr—presumably together with titles like Starfield, Mortal Kombat 1, Murderer’s Creed Mirage, Cities Skylines 2, Alan Wake 2, and Fashionable Warfare 3, to not point out the persevering with impression of Baldur’s Gate 3, which arrived in August—in addition to elevated working prices and delayed funding for brand spanking new video games.
“Ensuing from this blue moon state of affairs, we needed to make the tough resolution to reshape the studio to mirror the place we discover ourselves in on the finish of this yr, focusing all our efforts now on Misplaced Skies,” Olifiers stated. “This implies we discover ourselves within the heartbreaking place of getting to let roughly one third of the studio go—amongst them, a few of our closest colleagues.”
Introduced in Might 2023, Misplaced Skies is an open-world co-op survival sport for 1-6 gamers that appears fairly a bit like Worlds Adrift, the airship MMO mission that Bossa shut down in 2019. Bossa hasn’t but stated whether or not the launch of Misplaced Skies, which was deliberate for someday in 2024, will likely be affected by the layoffs.
The layoffs at Bossa cap off what was a distinctly sad yr for sport business workers. Whereas 2023 was arguably probably the greatest years in reminiscence when it comes to the video games that launched, it additionally noticed an alarming variety of layoffs throughout quite a few studios and the outright closure of a number of, together with Versus Evil, Free Radical Design, Campfire Cabal, and Volition. Satirically, Versus Evil father or mother TinyBuild acquired the Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread, and I Am Fish properties from Bossa in 2022 for $3 million; Olifiers, the Bossa CEO, advised GamesIndustry in 2023 that the deal gave the corporate “a battle chest that permits us to climate any form of delays or giant funding we determine to make on this new sport we’re making.”
