If you’re getting tired of hearing about stories featuring studios laying off their workers, you’re not alone. This has been one of the most dominant and prominent stories in 2024, and the “series of events” technically started back in 2023, when 10,000 people within the industry lost their jobs. That trend has arguably gotten even worse in 2024, and it’s been made clear many times over that it’s not showing any signs of slowing down. Even games you might not have heard of, like Tales of Kenzera, have seen their development team getting laid off, putting the fate of all teams in question.
For those who don’t know, Tales of Kenzera: Zau was made by Surgent Studios, who made the game under the EA Original label and launched the platformer earlier this year. The game didn’t do too bad on Metacritic, getting a 76 aggregate, which is fair enough for a game that some defined as a game that could’ve been better, but had the building blocks to be special later on.
However, as shown on LinkedIn by Game Developer, multiple people from the team are posting that they’re looking for new jobs, as their time at the studio has been cut short. To give you some context, the studio’s debut title was only released three months ago. Here are what some of the team members said:
Technical artist Jordan Smee said they were “joining all the people affected by industry layoffs this year.”
Level designer Peter Brisbourne put out on the site: “The chapter entitled ‘Pete Works At Surgent Studios’ is coming to a close at the end of the month.”
It’s sad to see this for multiple reasons, not the least of which was that they had JUST released their first game into the world, yet now they’re already shutting down part of their game division. It’s true that the studio itself will likely be fine because it also has work ties to TV and film, but that’s not the point here. They were trying to make a video game studio and released a decent first game through EA, and now, they’re cutting some of their people.
It’s unclear as to why the cuts are being made, but the reasoning won’t matter too much to the people being let go. They are just the latest casualties in a video game world that is cutting jobs left and right, and there are only so many jobs to go around.
