TMNT: The Last Ronin Developer Black Forest Games Reportedly Hit With Layoffs, About 50% Of Its Staff Gone

Black Forest Games, the Embracer Group owned studio who delivered remakes for both Destroy All Humans! games and is working on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin title has been hit with layoffs.

A report from Kotaku claims that about 50% of developers have been impacted, or about 50 people, since the latest numbers for Black Forest Games staff sat at 110 employees.

Unlike other layoffs from earlier this week, those impacted are going to be left wondering what the next stage will look like into next week. At least in cases like Riot and Discord, employees were put into ‘next steps’ meetings that same day.

Every layoff announcement or report that comes is just as upsetting to see as the last. Any layoff coming out of Embracer Group is particularly upsetting considering how it further layers on the massively negative impact the company has had on the games industry.

For years, Embracer was treating game studios like items in a shop that’s having a huge sale. Scooping up multiple studios at a time, purposely trying to increase their size on the hope that they’ll release enough games to make back their investment.

As Embracer Group chief executive officer Lars Wingefors once put it, “If you can make one game, you have a big business risk, but if you make 200 games, like we do, the business risk is less.”

It’s almost ironic then, considering that this was Embracer Group’s strategy, and all these layoffs are a result of the company putting all its eggs in the basket of a deal with the Saudi Arabian government subsidiary Savvy Games Group, that didn’t go through.

What stops it from being ironic is once you remember that Lars Wingefors still has a job, and that thousands of others have instead suffered from decisions made by him and the other high-level executives at Embracer Group.

Source – [Kotaku]