Game news While this game is rated 89/100 on Metacritic, its publisher fires several of its developers…
Despite what one might believe, the quality of a game or a license is not at all enough to ensure the employment of its creators. In any case, this is what this publisher proves to us, which is going to lay off several employees despite the critical success of its latest game rated 89/100 on Metacritic…
See Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth on Amazon
SEGA separates several employees
Even if the publisher has never really regained the position it had a few decades ago, SEGA is still one of the most prolific video game companies. In addition to announcing the all-new Sonic remake of Persona 3. However, despite assured critical success (Like a Dragon peaked at 89/100 on Metacritic and Persona 3 received an 18/20 in our columns), SEGA has just announced that its American branch will part ways with several employees.
On March 8, 2024, SEGA of America will lay off no less than 61 people, which represents 14% of the workforce in this branch. Very bad news for those concerned who were warned 60 days in advance via an official notification as required by California law. The company had already been under fire when they threatened a large number of unionized employees with the same fate last November. This story joins too many others to prove that the success of a game or a license never really prevents a studio from wanting to save money. As a reminder, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth sold more than a million copies in its first week, and the quality of the title continues to stand out on the web. Persona 3 Reload, for its part, managed to bring together no less than 42,112 players simultaneously on Steam during its first day of availability, a record that no Atlus game had managed to achieve until then.
An already very difficult year for video games
You may have read it here and there on the internet (as well as in our own columns), the year 2023 was particularly disastrous for video game developers. Despite an excellent vintage on the player side with games like Baldur’s Gate 3, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Or Alan Wake 2 (to name just a few), last year was indeed the scene of a very large number of layoffs and studio closures. Unfortunately, the trend does not seem to be reversing in 2024, quite the contrary. Since January 2024 alone, there have been several thousand job losses in the video game industry and those surrounding it. In recent weeks, we have been able to face a terrible assessment:
This wave of mass layoffs follows the failure of companies to meet the unachievable goals they set after the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, some are also linked to the restructuring involved in certain takeovers, such as that of Activision-Blizzard by Microsoft for example. We hope that things will calm down over the next few weeks, although it would be more realistic to accept that this probably won’t be the case.
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