Horizon developer Guerrilla Games will be laying off 40 employees.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, this is part of the total 900 employee layoffs that was announced by Sony yesterday. Guerrilla Games themselves have 400 employees, so this is a serious reduction of 10 % of the company’s workforce.
Guerrilla Games was founded in 2001 as Lost Boys Games, and was acquired by Sony in 2005. They were originally known as the studio behind the Killzone shooter series, but they saw their profile rise with the release of Horizon: Zero Dawn. Their newest upcoming release will be Horizon Forbidden West – Complete Edition, bundling the main game and the Burning Shores expansion for Windows this March 21, 2024.
Guerrilla has been humorously victimized by a meme that their Horizon games have been releasing next to bigger games, so they don’t get as much attention and awards as they could have otherwise. Regardless of how true that is, it is still true that Guerrilla has become a top tier game developer, whose titles sell millions on the PlayStation platform.
Guerrilla is committed to making future Horizon games with Aloy, but they are also working on an online game in the same Horizon universe. This may be one of several live service games greenlit by Sony.
Now, we have to take a minute to step back and understand what these layoffs mean for Guerrilla and their upcoming games. If Horizon gets a live service game, it may do a lot to raise the franchise’s profile thanks to the free-to-play players. However, the studio is already facing a serious setback that affects that game’s success.
While losing 10 % of your employees doesn’t mean you can no longer make those games, it puts Guerrilla Games in a tight spot. They will now have to assign people to take the place of those employees who were fired. That means an increase in workload for those devs. Now, they may not necessarily be forced to do overtime or crunch by Guerrilla Games. However, this may lead to Guerrilla taking that much longer to finish making their games.
It’s also a bad situation on an individual level, as those employees will now get more workplace stress and other issues. As the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata stated:
“If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease, and I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.”
What Iwata shared then, is what employees at Guerrilla Games, and other studios who had layoffs, are experiencing right now. And sadly, this will be the norm for much of the game industry’s biggest studios in the coming years, as this wave of layoffs continues in its second year.
