Devolver Digital’s CEO has stepped down, shortly after the studio themselves had layoffs in their own company.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, a few hours before, Devolver fired half of the staff in Artificer, a studio they fully owned. 18 employees were leaving immediately, while 10 employees would be leaving after they finished their latest project.
This led to the announcement that Devolver’s current CEO, Douglas Morin, had stepped down from the company. Morin had just joined the company in 2020 and became its CEO the year after. Morin’s biggest achievement in the company was bringing it to its IPO in that same year, of 2021.
Morin said he left “as part of planning for Devolver’s long-term growth and development”. This statement doesn’t directly indicate that his leaving was due to the company also having to fire developers. At least, it is a conspicuous change from the industry trend.
Morin’s replacement in this position is Harry Miller. Harry was one of the founders of Devolver Digital, and had previously served as its CEO.
Harry shared this statement about the changes:
“On behalf of the Board and everyone at Devolver, I would like to thank Douglas for his significant commitment and achievements at Devolver in the last four years.
Douglas’ energy, leadership and determination were critical to our IPO and programme to build our infrastructure as a listed company, culminating in the exciting System Era acquisition.
I am excited by the opportunity to step back into the CEO role. It’s an incredible pleasure and honour to continue to work with Devolver’s fantastic and talented team, building out a strong pipeline of fun and creativity, and of course delivering on our long-term growth strategy.”
Devolver Digital reported a rough 2023. As explained in this Game World Observer report, the first half of that fiscal year saw them take a loss of $ 3.5 million. Their fortunes improved in the second half, thanks to good performance of new titles like Wizard With A Gun and The Talos Principle 2 and a long tail on some of their more popular older titles.
While it may look like the small games, often called indie games, is less risky than AAAs, the companies making them are still coalescing to get bigger, and are taking bigger risks, to also make their games just a little bit bigger. There may be a lot of gamers who don’t buy small games in favor of AAAs or live service games, but gaming has enough of a captive market for small games to be big business.
In the current gaming industry landscape, unfortunately, Devolver also found themselves taking on too much risk, and now have to work with less workers. GameRanx wishes the best for all the outgoing staff at Devolver Digital, and we hope they can find placement back in the game industry.
