StarBreeze Studio Lets Go of 25% of Employees

We already knew that Starbreeze Studio wasn’t doing so great right now: they up and said that they have less than a year to keep their lights on if nothing changes, and they’ve already sold many of their IPs – such as System Shock 3 -- and studios (Dhruva Interactive) in order to stay afloat. So obviously, everything is on the table when it comes to cost-cutting measures: including, unsurprisingly, layoffs.

Starbreeze CEO Mikael Nermark had this to say:

"In the past six months we have made a number of changes to the business following our strategy to focus on the core business. We have divested some operations that we consider non-core and we now have to look inward to make the core business more efficient… To make staff reductions is a tough decision to make, but necessary to enable Starbreeze to develop well long-term."

Now, this year we’ve been seeing major studios lay off enormous amounts of people, so by comparison, the 60 people being let go by Starbreeze seems fairly mild… until you learn that makes up 25 percent of their total workforce. That’s a pretty big number, and a pretty deep cut.

That will probably go a good ways to helping them keep their doors open for what remains of their workforce – it’ll supposedly save them 3 million krona per month, which averages out to $318,000 USD. But no doubt it won’t be enough. They can’t just save money, they have to find some way to start making it, and right now (as far as we can see) they have no plans for that.

Of course, it’s never too late to hastily put out a cheesy Battle Royale game based on a game show. Didn’t work for Boss Keys, but hey, who knows, maybe that was a fluke.

I joke, but really, this is terrible.