DON’T NOD, known for games like this year’s Aphelion, has announced that it is undergoing some restructuring in order to “maintain its competitiveness”. While the company’s press release didn’t offer too many details about the scale of this restructuring, the fact that it is going to meet with representative bodies of its employees to implement a “job protection plan” indicates that layoffs will be involved.
More details about how the company will change up its businesses and the scale of the layoffs will likely be revealed later this week, following the market closing on September 3rd, which will also involve a meeting between the DON’T NOD board of directors and the representative bodies for the employees. Whatever next steps the company ends up taking as part of its “transformation plan” are slated to be “in compliance with its regulatory obligations regarding market disclosure.”
Rumors from back in June had indicated that DON’T NOD would be getting hit by layoffs. Amidst discussions about the at-the-time impending job cuts at Xbox (which culminated in layoffs affecting around 1,600 employees across the company), French journalist Sylvain Trinel said that the gaming industry was on the cusp of a “massive bloodbath” affecting studios and publishers.
Aside from companies under Xbox, like id Software and Bethesda, Trinel pointed to other major developers like DON’T NOD and Quantic Dream, and said that there are “a lot of layoffs expected in many very well-known studios. It’s going to be a catastrophe.”
DON’T NOD’s most recent release was Aphelion, which came out on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S back in May. The title saw a middling reception, with many of its Steam reviews contributing to its “Mixed” overall rating. Our own review gave it a score of 7 out of 10 thanks to excellent story, characters, visuals, and pacing. However, the lack of difficulty options along with generally poor enemy AI were major complaints we had.
As for the company itself, DON’T NOD is no stranger to layoffs at this point. Just last year, it had laid off 9 of its employees from its Montreal-based studio. Confirmation came from principal cinematic artist Mary Pouliot, along with technical artist Laurent Dufresne.
“Today, I was part of the layoff wave at DON’T NOD Montréal,” posted Pouliot on LinkedIn. “Although I was anticipating this dreadly fatality that is now a habit in the industry, it came to me as a real shock. I did not anticipate that this morning when waking up and going to the studio. But there it is. No cinematic artist anymore at DNM.”
Further details about the layoffs came courtesy of French game developers’ union Syndicat de Travailleureuses du Jeu Video, who said in a statement that the layoffs were part of cost reductions “across the group”.
“In France, the union fight succeeded in drastically limiting the number of lay-offs and in obtaining acceptable departure conditions. We encourage and support our comrades and colleagues who are organising the industry across the Atlantic! Direct action gets the goods.”
In the meantime, DON’T NOD has confirmed that it is working on video game adaptations based on Netflix’s IPs.
