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Just Cause creators Avalanche lay off 50 people and close their Montreal and New York studiosCuts needed to ensure “a stable and sustainable future for the company”
Cuts needed to ensure “a stable and sustainable future for the company”
Image credit:Avalanche
Image credit:Avalanche
Just Causecreators,Mad Maxdevelopers andRage 2co-developers Avalanche Studios have announced that they will lay off 50 developers - nine per cent of their global workforce - and close their New York, USA and Montreal, Canada studios in order to “ensure a stable and sustainable future for the company”.
Theannouncement postdoesn’t go into much detail about either the reasons for the layoffs or how exactly Avalanche will be supporting the departing staff, adding only that “our focus is now on supporting all Avalanchers through this challenging time” and that “we’re grateful for the invaluable contributions of those leaving and remain committed to creating incredible gaming experiences for our players.”
Avalanche as a whole turned 20 in 2023. Their current projects includeContraband for Xbox Game Studios- an open world co-op game about smugglers with a focus on vehicular battling, set in the fictional Southeast Asian region of Bayan in the 1970s.
The layoffs follow hard on the heels of a unionisation agreement for Avalanche staff in Sweden. In April,Avalanche entered into a collective bargaining agreement with Swedish labour organisations Unionen and Engineers of Sweden, with a view to “[standardising] frameworks around essential areas such as salaries, benefits, employee influence and career support”. The deal will take effect in 2025, and Swedish Avalanche workers are now in the process of hashing out the specifics with management. It’s not clear how, if at all, this relates to the decision to shutter the New York and Montreal offices.
The studio closures fit a larger pattern of games industry mass layoffs over the past year or two that have been widely attributed to a mixture of “overambitious” expansion during the lockdown gaming boom, technological innovations/gimmicks such as NFTs not paying off, general economic upheaval, and a desire for returns on investment that are increasingly hard to square with the sheer expense of developing a blockbuster videogame.
You can read more about the gutting of the games industry inmy feature from this year’s GDC.
