Splash Damage Announces Layoffs After Four Years Without A New Game Release

Splash Damage has announced layoffs, joining the wave that has now been running for two years.

The studio shared a statement to GamesIndustry.Biz:

“Following a recent business review, we have reached a point where we must adapt our structure to better suit the needs of our current and future games.

Despite every effort to avoid it, this unfortunately means that a small number of roles across the studio are potentially at risk of redundancy.

These roles are predominantly on the operations side of the business, with our development teams remaining largely unaffected. All games – both announced and unannounced – remain in development.

We understand this is a difficult time for some, and we are committed to supporting those impacted.”

It’s been a tumultuous five years for the studio, who first made their name with Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Splash Damage has been through multiple ups and downs, including an early live service title that didn’t get off the ground called Dirty Bomb. Between 2015 to 2019, they worked for Xbox Game Studios on the Gears games and Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

In 2020 Splash Damage launched a Google Stadia exclusive called Outriders, which died out alongside the platform’s closure just a year later. Outriders was also the last game the studio had released.

Later in 2020, the studio was acquired by TenCent, and they claimed they were working on several ambitious projects. So far, we only know of Transformers: Reactivate, and an open world survival title codenamed Project Astrid.

While many of the studios doing layoffs seemed to be making perplexing decisions, that isn’t the case here. This is not to say these layoffs are justified; it is unfortunately logical that a studio that hasn’t released a game in four years may not be bringing enough money in to keep going.

Even if the studio is owned by a big corporation, like Sony, Microsoft, or in this case TenCent, that big company can’t cover up for studios or divisions that are not profitable indefinitely. In this particular situation, at least, Splash Damage was able to justify keeping most of their developers, at least if their claims are correct.

The light out of the tunnel for Splash Damage here would be if they could start delivering on some of these titles soon, and hopefully, their bet on making successful titles would bear fruit. Transformers: Reactivate did look promising, and now we know that it’s only one in a wave of new Transformers video games, it will hopefully be judged on its own terms.