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A rough few days for the games industry has continued, as it’s now come to light that British studio Team 17 is the latest to suffer layoffs, including that of its own CEO.
The reports earlier this afternoon came from Eurogamer, citing sources close to the company that around 50 roles, mostly in the publisher’s QA department, were at risk due to a major restructuring process. The reports claimed that the company is choosing to outsource its QA work, losing a number of junior QA analyst roles as well as CEO Michael Pattison who was also stepping down. The latter was confirmed in a statement provided to VG247 around an hour later, which read: “In response to the reports concerning the departure of Michael Pattison from Team17, we can confirm we have amicably parted ways with Michael. We can also confirm that we have sadly entered into a period of consultation today within Team17 Digital, with Astragon and Storytoys remaining unaffected by the restructuring plans.”
It’s been a rough time for the games industry of late, with layoffs affecting several other major studios in the last week, including Sega’s decision to cancel Hyenas at Creative Assembly resulting in the loss of a number of jobs despite the fact the game was relatively close to release. Just a day later, Fortnite creator Epic Games also announced it was making redundancies and cutting back on staff. As a result a huge number of workers at Fall Guys creator Mediatonic were also let go – although not, as some initial reports erroneously claimed, the entire studio. A letter from Epic’s CEO claimed the move was in order to cut costs “without breaking development or our core lines of businesses so we can continue to focus on our ambitious plans.”
We’ve also reached out for comment, and will keep you updated on any further developments. Meanwhile, Team 17’s most recently published game is Trepang 2, which arrived on Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 today, after having being released on PC earlier this year. We at Videogamer send our thoughts to anyone affected by today’s news.
