The word is out that PopCap, the creators of Plants vs Zombies, have laid off over 50 employees at their base in Seattle and a few more at their Dublin studio. The lay offs were confirmed by the studio's co-founder John Vechey.
Vechey penned a blog post which explained that the job cuts were made as part of a "reorganization effort", which were "due to the fast-moving changes in the mobile games market."
In other words, making mobile games isn't as lucrative as it used to be, especially now that PopCap and other large companies face steep competition from smaller development teams which appear to be more than capable of putting out high quality games with far less expense.
“In the past year, we’ve seen a dramatic change in the way people play and pay for games. Free-to-play, social and mobile games have exploded in popularity. That happened fast. Surprisingly so. The change in consumer tastes requires us to reorganise our business and invest in new types of games on new platforms. It’s a completely different world from when we started,” he wrote on the blog.
“There’s also an economic component to the reorganisation. To stay in business, we need to manage costs, improve efficiency and maintain a profit.”
Far be it for anyone to criticize the company for trying to make a profit, but why does profit always have to come at the expense of employee livelihoods?