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Mobile developer Gameloft shuttered its UK base last week but since that closure, it’s come to light that the firm was forced to make cuts in Australia and the Phillippines, too.
In the days since the UK closure, GI.biz reports the company had also closed its Manila branch earlier this year, which chiefly housed the firm’s web services, and layoffs are reported in Brisbane, Australia, too.
The studio’s managing director John-Paul Burke announced the closure of the UK office on Linkedin but did not specify how many employees have been affected by the closure in the UK, but it was later confirmed seven staff were made redundant. The company said it was “working with all employees, on a case by case basis, to find the best way to handle their situation in accordance with local employment regulations”.
“Unfortunately last week we closed Gameloft UK. What an amazing time we had there. For me as someone who has been playing Gameloft games from 2005 it was a dream job and I thank them for the opportunity,” Burke said last week.
“It gave me a fantastic platform and took me to beautiful cities and worked with amazing clients and colleagues. We had tremendous success and now it is on to the next exciting challenge. I would like to thank […] all the team members we had the honor to work with over the last few years.”
In a fuller statement from the firm concerning the UK closure, Gameloft said it was forced to “adapt [its] resources capacities” and is “adjusting and redeploying [its] commercial network to reflect [its] priorities”.
These latest layoffs sadly come on the back of several other closures and cutbacks we’ve seen across studios in recent months, most recently Amazon Game Studios and PayDay developer, Starbreeze. In a brief statement on the latter company’s official website, the firm said it had decided to make organisational changes “in order to make the organization more efficient and reduce costs”, resulting in 60 redundancies primarily from its Stockholm office.
Other recent layoffs and closures include Iron Tiger Studios, ArenaNet, Next Games, Forgotten Key, Define Human Studios, Bandai Namco Vancouver, and Trion Worlds. Telltale Games also laid off its staff in a studio closure back in September 2018.
