The crisis in the videogame market is also striking Certain Affinitywith layoffs of mass reported also for the study which recently has mainly dealt with the development support for Halo and Call of Duty.
This is the first significant personnel cut for the team in its 17-year history, a negative and significant event for the Texas-based team, which has so far remained extremely active and prolific despite being under little scrutiny.
The team worked mostly as support studyto support the development of projects credited mainly to other teams, but it is a very widespread specialization within the gaming industry and Certain Affinity is a sort of authority in this area.
Problems never seen before, for Certain Affinity
“Over the last 12 months we have had to deal with… challenges never encountered before“, reported CEO and founder Max Hoberman, “there were no exceptions to this.”
“Today we made the extremely difficult decision to lay off 25 of our employees in the United States”, which is a maneuver that the team had never had to take before and which comes as an epochal event for the studio.
“There are various factors that led us to the decision to make this staff cut for the first time in our 17-year history,” explained the CEO. “The most significant is a general slowdown in the industry even in the financing of new projects to be developed collaboratively, and the reluctance of investors to finance video game companies. This has made it exceptionally difficult to establish new projects and new work to complete “.
However, Hoberman said the team is doing everything it can to help the laid-off employees find new jobs, as well as support them financially. Some time ago, Certain Affinity reported that it was working on its own original first-person shooter, but there was no further news about it.
The announcement of the layoffs comes very close to the announcement of staff cuts at Gearbox, the closure of Smilegate Barcelona and cuts at Relic Entertainment and also Nintendo of America.
