Just one day after layoffs at Ubisoft, Torn Banner, and Sweet Bandits put more than 300 people out of work, Friday the 13th developer Illfonic has announced that it too is making cuts to its staff.
“Today we had to accept the harsh reality that the state of the industry has impacted us here at Illfonic,” co-founder and CEO Charles Brunghardt wrote in a message posted to LinkedIn. “It is with the heaviest of hearts that cuts to our teams had to be made today as we re-aligned to a refined strategy.”
Brunghardt didn’t say how many employees were put out of work, but former community and social media manager Michael Robles said on LinkedIn that “a lot of very talented people were laid off.”
Illfonic was founded in 2007 and found success, despite some high-profile troubles, with Friday the 13th: The Game. We quite liked it, and it was a success, selling almost two million copies over its first few months of release. But work was brought up short in 2018 by a dispute over ownership of the Friday the 13th property. Illfonic’s follow-up games did not fare as well. Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed was not great and failed to attract much of an audience, while the multiplayer horror game Killer Klowns From Outer Space, released earlier this year, was better received but also garnered little attention.
Like yesterday’s layoffs at Ubisoft, Torn Banner, and Sweet Bandits (and the late November shutdowns of Humanoid Origin and Worlds Untold), these cuts seem especially brutal because of their proximity to the holidays. In the bigger picture, though, they represent an industry in a state of freefall, put there by Covid-19 mismanagement and the relentless pursuit of profit. As I said earlier today, because this keeps happening so often and so quickly, 2023 was awful and 2024 is set to be even worse: This kind of attrition is simply not sustainable, and yet at this point I don’t have much hope that things are going to be meaningfully better in 2025.
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