jurassic world alive And Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery Publisher Jam City on Thursday laid off 17% of employees at the company and its subsidiary Ludia. Jam City, which made a match-3 game cookie jam in 2014 and has locations throughout the US and Canada, acquired Ludia, based in Montreal and known for making both original and branded games, in 2021 and collectively has approximately 1,400 employees.
About 200 workers were laid off on Thursday between Jam City and Ludia. Spoke to Ludia’s 10 affected employees and two current employees. Several former Ludia employees who reported that they were either on vacation or on vacation, first traced them to other coworkers and then noticed that they had lost access to the relevant accounts.
ludia workers who were No The layoffs were first communicated through a large meeting, where employees were instructed not to tell others, according to a recording of the call obtained by Polygon. Later, HR started dragging the affected persons to separate meetings. At least one worker reported that they began to lose access to their various work accounts as they waited for their scheduled meeting time. Other confused employees began questioning layoffs in a public Slack room.
Most workers said they were surprised by the layoffs, noting that they had previously been promised it would not happen — that the Jam City acquisition would let Ludia do more than it already has. “People are really upset,” reported one current employee. “Ludia has treated us very well over the years. They have done a lot to take care of us, but that attitude has been changing since the acquisition. We have tried to make our voices heard, but in general, we Ignored. We feel voiceless.”
After securing $350 million in funding from South Korean game company Netmarble, Jam City bought Ludia for $165 million in September 2021. miracle field of champions According to VentureBeat developer Kabam and others. Four former employees reported that Jam City had issued a few short rounds of layoffs between then and now. However, Thursday’s layoffs are the biggest of them all.
A Jam City spokesperson explained that the decision was made “in light of the challenging global economy and its impact on the gaming industry”. The spokesperson continued:
In light of the challenging global economy and its impact on the gaming industry, Jam City has made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team by approximately 17 percent. In recent years, we have made several strategic acquisitions, and this move represents the right size of our work force to address the redundancies associated with those transactions. While JAM City remains profitable, we believe that in the current operating environment, this is an essential step to enhance our financial flexibility and enhance operational efficiencies, positioning JAM City better for long-term growth. It also follows a broad restructuring that we recently completed to reorganize our development teams under style divisions focused on theme expertise to optimize performance. We thank those who are leaving us for their many contributions and providing severance packages and benefits to help us transition.
He said the workers were given a severance package which increases with the time employed by the company.
Jam City has publicly detailed its next game, which is called Champions Ascension and will be built on the blockchain in a white paper in May. Champions Ascension Characters can currently be purchased on OpenSea as NFTs; There are 7,622 available as of writing. Some laid-off employees speculated that Jam City’s approach to blockchain gaming may have influenced the layoffs on Thursday. separately Champions AscensionJam City has worked on many licensed and original games, such as genie and gem, Disney emoji the BlitzAnd Family Guy: Another freakin’ mobile game,
Ludia, which was founded in 2007, began by making licensed games such as price is right and other game show brands, and moved on to other games like The Bachelor: The Videogame And jurassic world alive,
“The problem that comes with game development is that we have too much nondisclosure,” said one activist. “It’s hard for these things to feel like you’re at risk. If you can talk about this type of layoff, let people know it’s happening. Otherwise it just goes under the radar.” “Game development is going on as business as ever. But in a city like Montreal, which has such a large number of studios, it can be disastrous.”