People Can Fly lays off more than 120 employees as it cuts back on in-development games: 'We need to tailor our plans to our financial capacity'
People Can Fly, the Polish developer of games including Bulletstorm, Gears of War: Judgment, and Outriders, has laid off more than 120 employees, a move the studio said was necessary "as external market pressures persisted beyond our forecasts."
People Can Fly CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski said is a message posted to social media that the layoffs are the result of a change in the studio's self-publishing strategy, which includes the suspension of Project Victoria, a reduction of the team working on Project Bifrost, and "restructuring some of our supporting teams."
"The videogame market is still evolving, and we have to adjust with where things are today," People Can Fly CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski wrote. "We are redoubling our efforts with new work for hire engagements and focusing on the development of a single independent game.
"We believe in our teams, games, and their potential, and we remain extremely committed to continuing that journey, but we need to tailor our plans to our financial capacity."
People Can Fly's website says the studio has more than 700 employees, presumably a pre-layoff headcount.
Neither Project Victoria nor Bifrost had been publicly revealed, but People Can Fly have been working on both for at least two years. The studio referenced the games when it announced the end of its publishing deal with Take-Two Interactive in 2022, saying it would self-publish both. But it's had a rough time of things since then: Project Dagger, which it had been developing in partnership with Take-Two since 2020, ran into trouble in 2023 and was eventually axed earlier this year.
Layoffs suck, and the decimation of the videogame industry we've witnessed over the past two years is an ongoing indictment of executive leadership virtually across the board. But as we said last week when Ubisoft, Torn Banner, and Sweet Bandits imposed layoffs of their own—which came just weeks after layoffs at other studios including Thunderful, Humanoid Origin, Reflector Entertainment, and Worlds Untold, and just before layoffs at Illfonic and Deck Nine, in case there was any doubt that there's something very wrong here—the timing of these cuts, which come just 15 days before Christmas, makes them especially ugly.
This will be the second round of layoffs at People Can Fly in 2024—the first happened in January, when more than 30 people working on yet another project, codenamed Gemini, were let go.