Hubertz quits as Bigpoint cuts 120 jobs

Heiko Hubertz has left his role as CEO as German online gaming giant Bigpoint cuts over 120 jobs.

However, intense competition and the expense of paying employees in San Francisco – the second most expensive city in the US – has led Bigpoint to conclude that developing games in the states is not its best option.

We have seen that developing games in the US is not really the most efficient way for us at the moment," Hubertz toldGames Industry."The games that we have developed in the last two years haven’t been that successful, and the San Francisco area and Bay Area is quite a competitive market."

The cuts effect 80 at the company’s Hamburg office and more than 40 at the San Francisco location.

Staff were informed of the decision today.

"We need space for other investments in other areas," continued Hubertz."We’ve doubled our revenues almost every year, and we had a budget for this year of what we wanted in terms of revenue. Unfortunately we haven’t had the strong growth we hoped, but we had hired for this growth."

The company asserts that no current projects will be effected, and the layoffs were mostly within administrative staff.The cutbacks are due to a percieved need for greater focus to get a bigger slice of the market.

Hubertz will be moving to the company’s advisory board at year’s end as executive chairman, at which time his replacement will be named. The exec added thatthis isn’t the first time that he has attempted to resign, but that his replacement didn’t work out.

Develop has the full story.