Smilegate Barcelona seems to have closed down.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, several former employees have posted about the studio closure on LinkedIn. They also claim that all employees were laid off as a result.
Parent company Smilegate is a Korean online game company founded in 2002. They made their name on online PC multiplayer games, including FreeStyle2, Lost Ark, and most famously Crossfire. Crossfire was at one point in the company’s history, the most played video game around the world, in spite of its relative obscurity in the biggest video game market in the US.
Smilegate is one of many Korean game companies looking to make inroads in the international market. Like Krafton, the company behind PUBG and Striking Distance Studios’ The Callisto Protocol, Smilegate decided the best way to do this was to start a new game studio in the West, staffing Western developers.
While Krafton chose to stick to US developers, Smilegate went to Barcelona for their studio. Now, Spain has a comparatively small video game industry. Perhaps the most famous of these is Mercury Steam, famous for making the Castlevania Lords of Shadow games as well as Metroid Samus Returns and Metroid Dread with Nintendo.
In spite of that, Smilegate did properly identify that Spain had a lot of veteran developers who had worked for the likes of Ubisoft and Eidos Montreal. On paper, this choice was a smart play, as they put this studio to work on a AAA open world video game for consoles.
Based on their Twitter activity, Smilegate Barcelona may have been founded shortly before or on January 2021. They were never able to properly announce what that forthcoming open world game was before this studio closure.
Now there has been an ongoing wave of layoffs in the video game industry, but most of those layoffs have been happening in the US. Business conditions in other countries seem to be completely different.
Some fans speculated that Japanese game companies were not firing their own employees because it would be prohibitively expensive to make the legally mandated retirement payous. In fact, Jim Ryan just made the call to do that to the PlayStation division in Japan. But Japan’s business environment seems to be pretty good for other companies in the country, as Capcom recently joined Nintendo, Square Enix, and Konami in raising salaries for their employees.
There is a terrible point of comparison in the situation for the video game industries in the US and Europe. While the wave of layoffs in America has been sad to see, entire offices are closing in the other continent.
We had reported on rumors that German studio Piranha Bytes could be closing in January. Piranha Bytes owner Embracer Group never confirmed this but it may have already happened. For another example, 505 Games has not shut down completely, but they closed operations in Germany, Spain, and France.
So it’s possible that Smilegate couldn’t afford to keep the lights on for their Barcelona studio, because of business conditions in Spain at the moment. Regardless of the potential reason for the closure, we wish the former employees of Smilegate Barcelona well and hope they can find placement back in the video game industry.
