Behaviour Interactive and CI Games have become the latest companies to announce layoffs in the new year, with both initiating cost-cutting measures to adapt to market conditions.
Behaviour Interactive has reportedly cut around 3% of its staff, cited by Kotaku as around 45 people. In a statement to Game Developer, a spokesperson for Behaviour Interactive confirmed the layoffs, and the need to adjust scope in a difficult economy.
“Recently, changing market conditions necessitated adjusting the scope of several Behaviour projects,” a spokesperson said. “In these situations, our preference is always to reassign talent to other projects. Unfortunately, this option is not always available to us. These departures represented less than 3 percent of our total workforce.”
Notably, Behaviour Interactive is on the cusp of releasing a major collaboration with Remedy Entertainment which will see Remedy hero Alan Wake entering Dead by Daylight as a playable Survivor.
Read: Gearbox studio Lost Boys Interactive impacted by major layoffs
CI Games, meanwhile, has reportedly laid off around 10% of its workforce. As first reported by GamesIndustry.biz, a number of staff recently took to LinkedIn to announce their redundancies, with CI Games later confirming the layoffs.
“To preserve business strength and stability, CI Games has made the tough but necessary decision to implement a targeted round of redundancies, affecting approximately 10% of employees across the company,” Marek Tymiński, CEO of CI Games said. “We would like to thank each of them for the part they’ve played during their time with us. Further business optimisations are being made to the organisation’s pipelines and processes.”
As noted by GamesIndustry.biz, CI Games’ latest release, Lords of the Fallen, was the studio’s most expensive project to date – although it was reportedly a major success, selling more than one million copies within its first ten days on sale. It’s unclear if the investment in this game contributed to the newly-announced layoffs at the company.
With these dual announcements, Behaviour Interactive and CI Games become just the latest game companies to initiate layoffs. So far in 2023, we’ve also seen Twitch, Unity, Discord, Lost Boys Interactive, and Thunderful Group taking similar moves. Smaller companies including PTW, Pixelberry Studios, Netspeak Games, and Wimo Games have also recently undergone significant cuts, per Kotaku‘s industry tracker.
