Avalanche Studios has revealed that they are the latest games industry studio to join the two year wave of layoffs.
As reported by Game Developer, the layoffs will affect 50 employees, who constitute 9 % of their total workforce. They are also closing their New York and Montreal based studios.
Avalanche shared this message in their statement:
“Our focus is now on supporting all Avalanchers through this challenging time. We’re grateful for the invaluable contributions of those leaving and remain committed to creating incredible gaming experiences for our players.”
It’s bittersweet news for several reasons. We had just reported last week that Hollywood was finally moving forward with a movie adaptation of Avalanche’s signature franchise, Just Cause. It is certainly a shame that some of the people who made those games won’t be in the studio anymore to celebrate and benefit from this project when it finally releases.
But it certainly goes deeper than that. Avalanche entered into a collective bargaining agreement with their employees in their home base in Sweden in October 2023, which was the same month wherein they opened their Montreal studio. Their main Sweden studio had fully unionized since then.
That Montreal studio had about seven months before it was unceremoniously closed. But, perhaps it also makes things feel complicated over at their main Swedish studios. Because of their union, their jobs were protected. But this also meant that their co-workers were vulnerable to getting fired instead. Similar situations did exist in several other companies that had layoffs in this ongoing industry wave, such as Activision Blizzard.
As to why this happened, it isn’t really that clear cut. Avalanche is a wholly independent studio that did not join the earlier wave of industry consolidation. While their latest announced project, Contraband, remains in development, they had most recently developed Rage 2 for id Software. Avalanche also revealed they are working on a “Cutting Edge AAA Open World Game” that isn’t Contraband.
But perhaps the situation is straightforward in its unpleasantness. It might be the case that Avalanche is simply suffering from the same contraction that the industry has been dealing with worldwide, following unprecedented growth during the lockdown and quarantine phase of the pandemic.
Because there simply aren’t as many people playing video games as before, the money has been drying up from investors, who don’t see the returns that they used to. Hopefully, this will be the limit of what Avalanche deals with as a consequence of this contraction, and they can come back to a position of growth in the future, perhaps when Contraband finally releases.
