GOG lays off ‘a dozen’ staff

Digital retailer GOG has laid off "a dozen" positions, purported to be around 10 per cent of its workforce.

Owed by The Witcher publisher CD Projekt, the digital platform has reportedly been struggling financially. Describing February as a "really bad month", someone affected by the changes said, "the market’s move towards higher [developer] revenue shares have, or will, affect the bottom line as well".

"Letting people go is never easy," a representative for GOG confirmed to Kotaku."We have been rearranging certain teams since October 2018, affecting in closing around a dozen of positions last week. At the same time, since the process started we have welcomed nearly twice as many new team members, and currently, hold 20 open positions."

"We were told it’s a financial decision," someone affected by the redundancies said. "GOG’s revenue couldn’t keep up with growth, the fact that we’re dangerously close to being in the red has come up in the past few months, and the market’s move towards higher [developer] revenue shares have, or will, affect the bottom line as well. I mean, it’s just an odd situation, like things got really desperate really fast. I know that February was a really bad month, but January, on the other hand, was excellent. We were in the middle of a general restructuring, moving some teams around, not unprecedented. But layoffs that big have never happened before."

These latest layoffs sadly come on the back of several other closures and cutbacks we’ve seen in the last few months across studios and media. Only a month after reportedly laying off an "undisclosed number" of staff from its American San Mateo studio, Iron Tiger Studios, South Korean online game publisher NCSoft has announced it will be making "staff reductions" at Guild Wars 2 developer, ArenaNet. Finnish studio Next Games recently announced it is laying off 26 staff after it reviewed "the cost structure of the company’s operations", and Activision recently laid off 8 per cent of its staff – 775 people.

Other closures include AER Memories of Old developer, Forgotten Key, Islands of Nyne: Battle Royale developer, Define Human Studios, Daybreak, Starbreeze, Bandai Namco Vancouver, and Trion Worlds, best known for its MMO games. Telltale Games laid off the majority of its staff in a ‘majority studio closure’ back in September. The media too has been affected, with the shuttering of leading strategy guides publisher Prima Games and Future’s GamesMaster and games™ magazines.