The games industry has been hit with wave after wave of layoffs for well over a year at this point, but the job cuts are not, unfortunately, slowing down. As reported by GamesIndustry, Sega has now announced that it’s cutting 240 jobs across its UK-based studios.
That will entail layoffs at Total War studio Creative Assembly, mobile specialist development team Sega HARDlight, and Sega Europe. Currently, the status of other UK-based Sega-owned studios – such as Two Point Studios (Two Point Hospital, Two Point Campus) and Spots Interactive (Football Manager) – is unknown.
“I want to sincerely apologise for the worry and understandable distress this news will cause, particularly for those directly affected,” Sega Europe’s newly-appointed Jurgen Post told staff. “These decisions have been incredibly tough to make, and they follow meticulous consideration and deliberation with leadership teams across the business. Change is necessary to secure the future of our games business, and to ensure that we are well placed to deliver the best possible experiences to our players going forward.
“We need to streamline, focus on what we are good at, and position ourselves as best we can for the road ahead. In order to do that, we need to respond to the changing economic landscape and the challenges we’re facing in the way we develop our products and bring them to market.”
This isn’t the first time Sega has had to resort to layoffs in recent months. Creative Assembly was impacted by job cuts last year when Sega cancelled the studio’s long-in-development multiplayer shooter HYENAS, which reportedly had the largest ever budget for a Sega title. The publisher said in the aftermath that Creative Assembly would go back to focusing on strategy games.
Earlier this month, Sega America also laid off 61 employees (roughly 13 percent of its workforce).
Meanwhile, Sega has also announced that Company of Heroes developer Relic Entertainment is splitting from the company and going independent.
