19 people lost their jobs during the month of December 2023 at the British company Bossa Studios. Information disclosed by our colleagues from GamesIndustry.biz, who managed to obtain some details on this sad situation: these layoffs mainly concerned “people employed in quality assurance and production roles, as well as non-UK employees“.
Somebody calls the doctor
According to Henrique Olifiers, the co-founder of the Bossa studio (comments reported by GamesIndustry), this situation is partly due to the fact that AAA games have been jostled during the year 2023, leaving little or no room for more humble productions: “following this extraordinary situation, we had to make the difficult decision to remodel the studio to reflect the position we find ourselves in at the end of this year, focusing all our efforts on Lost Skies. This means we find ourselves in the heartbreaking position of having to let about a third of the studio go – among them, some of our closest colleagues.” It must be said that in the tide of some 14,530 titles released on Steam in 2023 (thank you SteamDB), it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage to float on the surface.
Remember that TinyBuild had already acquired the Bossa studio catalog for next to nothing in 2022 ($3 million, which is not saying much on a market scale). Despite this boost, Bossa continues to be in bad shape. Let us assume that the abandonment of the project Worlds Adrift, a massively multiplayer title which was to take place in an archipelago of floating islands, left serious traces in the (celestial?) bodies of Bossa Studios. We will also find numerous elements of this Worlds Adrift in the Lost Skies mentioned by Henrique Olifiers, with ambitions largely revised downwards. Adios the MMO, Bossa has narrowed its proposal to a cooperative survival game for 1 to 6 players, still with floating islands as a setting. Not the desserts, but the things we found in Skies of Arcadia. Wishing Bossa that Lost Skies manages to save the studio furniture.