Hamburg-based company Goodgame Studios will lay off 200 people. The company explains the decision by increasing competition in the market of free-play games.
“Gaming companies (industry) are fighting for market shares amid the rapid growth of marketing budgets. The success of new games is increasingly difficult to predict. We have also suffered from this: our new developments have not yet brought the desired success,” Kai Wawrzinek, who returned to the post of CEO of Goodgame Studios, notes in a letter to employees. He is one of its founders.
Layoffs are part of the process of focusing on the core business of the company. The process started last summer. Then Goodgame Studios said goodbye to 400 employees.
The new layoffs will affect both specialists and management staff in all departments of the company. The former director, Maximilian Schneider, will leave the company by the end of February.
Goodgame Studios is going to support and develop existing projects. She has also already invested several million in the HTML5 direction.
In 2014, Goodgame Studios became the largest studio in Germany. In 2014 alone, it hired about 400 employees. As of February 2015, it employed 1,200 people. The main hits of the studio are the games Goodgame Empire and Big Farm.
Sources: Gamasutra, Venturebeat