Update July 17th 11:02AM ET: Virtuos has confirmed the below layoffs, describing them as “a rebalancing of roles across [its] studios and geographies”.
In an official statement, the studio says around 200 employees in Asia and about 70 in Europe will be losing their jobs, “including fewer than 10 in France, where the core team working on Oblivion Remastered is located”.
Original story follows below.
Original story: Virtuos, the studio behind this year’s Oblivion remaster and the upcoming Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater remake, is reportedly about to lay off hundreds of its employees.
According to a report by journalist Gauthier Andres, around 300 employees’ jobs are at risk at Virtuos, constituting around 7% of the studio’s overall workforce. These layoffs will mostly be concentrated in the Chinese branch of Virtuos, but employees in “many other areas” are at risk too, Andres says.
Supposedly, these employees are being laid off in the name of “competitiveness”, or so Andres says a memo sent to employees a few weeks ago reads. These layoffs reportedly follow payrise freezes and bonus reductions at Virtuos in February.
Andres also says that Virtuos employees have told him the company is ramping up its interest in generative AI; employees have reportedly received “basic but mandatory training” on AI in the last year.
According to Andres, Virtuos is “losing the trust” of many of its staff members, and while he doesn’t directly tie that loss of morale to the threat of AI, it’s hard not to draw a link between the two, especially when that’s reportedly exactly what’s happening at other studios.
Virtuos’ layoffs come as part of a wider industry layoff wave that has been going on for the past few years, with tens of thousands of industry employees losing their jobs, as well as major studios being closed down and huge projects being canceled.
This month alone, Microsoft reportedly laid off around 9,000 of its employees, and Xbox canceled projects in development at its subsidiary studios; both Rare’s Everwild and The Initiative’s Perfect Dark were shut down, and the latter studio closed its doors as well.
Whether these layoffs affect Virtuos’ work on the upcoming Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater remains to be seen, but we can say one thing: a studio’s game seemingly no longer needs to flop in order for employees to lose their jobs, and that’s a very worrying precedent. Stay tuned for more.
