Pinball FX and Zen Pinball developer Zen Studios is the latest Embracer owned studio to see layoffs.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, 32 employees were said to have lost their jobs. As of 2021, the company was reported as having 71 employees, so this is nearly half of the whole studio.
It’s a bad turn of events for the Hungarian company, that started in 2003 as a modest middleware and game port company. CEO and founder Zsolt Kigyossy had a personal interest in pinball, so he would turn the company towards making pinball games.
Their first game, Pinball FX, was a reasonable success for the company in the early 2000s, selling over 100,000 copies. However, because it was published by Microsoft, Zen Studios couldn’t bring it to other platforms.
And so, they went on to make Zen Pinball, published to the PlayStation 3, and later Wii U and mobile. The company saw continued success making multiplatform, original pinball tables, selling each table individually or in bundles. They would license for Marvel Pinball and Star Wars Pinball, and soon make new non pinball related games.
In 2013, the company named CastleStorm, a tower defense game that added Angry Birds style catapult combat and resource management. They also released Kickbeat, a martial arts themed rhythm game.
Other licenses and games followed, culminating with Pinball FX 3. Zen would publish Pinball FX 3 on their own to multiple platforms, and take the opportunity to bridge the gap between the prior Zen Pinball and Pinball FX games. Afterwards, Zen would see its greatest triumph, as it secured the licenses to recreate the original Bally and Williams pinball tables, that date from the 2010s all the way to the 1950s.
Zen Studios’ connection with Embracer is short. Embracer acquired published Saber Interactive in February 2020, and Saber then acquired Zen Studios in 2023.
It’s certainly one of those situations where Zen Studios would have probably wished they did not get involved in it in the first place. Relative to their success, Zen Studios is comparatively small and has stayed that way while being successful. While nothing is guaranteed in the industry, they may have gotten through the pandemic years on the success of their own games.
It’s truly mindboggling that Zen Studios now has to suffer because of mistakes that upper management made, far from their own independent operations. This will definitely also be a setback to their future pinball games and other projects. We wish well to Zen Studios’ current and former employees, and hope they can all bounce back from this soon.
