August is shaping up to be another ‘bloody’ month for video game workers. A few days ago, Jam City laid off 85 people, or around 10% of their workforce. This is coming a few days after Bungie axed 220 employees and Game Informer announced it was closing shop after 33 years.
On LinkedIn, Jam City described itself as “an award-winning entertainment company providing unique and deeply engaging mobile games that are played by tens of millions of people across the globe”.
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Although Jam City is headquartered in Culver City, California, it has teams and studios located globally across different cities, including San Francisco, Toronto, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Montreal, and others.
Jam City is led by CEO Josh Yguado. The studio is behind some of the highest-grossing mobile games. The company’s franchise ‘Cookie Jam’ has generated over half a billion dollars while ‘Panda Pop’ has over 120 million downloads.
“After a challenging 2023, industry analysts predicted an upward trend for gaming in 2024,” wrote Yguado in an email to staff. “While we have seen moderate improvements in some areas, the overall upward trend has not materialized as expected.”
“Projections indicate these conditions will continue for some time with improvements not expected until the second half of 2025.”
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Jam City’s RPG titled Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery hit number 1 in more than 40 countries when it launched in April 2018. On July 2, 2024, the company announced that it had bagged three nominations for this year’s Mobile Games Awards in the Best Live Ops and Best Storytelling categories for Hogwarts Mystery and also in the Best Developer category.
Jam City ex-employees react to the layoff
Several impacted employees have posted about the Jam City layoff on LinkedIn. According to Nicole Carpenter of Polygon, the studio had around 1,400 employees in 2022. However, that number has now shrunk to less than 800 following the latest round of layoffs.
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“Unfortunately, I was hit in the latest round of layoffs after nearly 4 years of Game Design work at Jam City,” wrote game designer Emerson Dauwalder. “However, hopefully this will lead to a new, future opportunity helping to create engaging and powerful games and narratives!”
Live operations coordinator Henry Trujillo relished the time he spent at the studio and wished the studio well. “So today my time at Jam City is over as I was impacted from a layoff. I did enjoy my time at the company and hope nothing but the best for my previous employers,” he wrote.
It was particularly painful to see people who have spent over a decade with the company being let go. One such person was Marcus Tan, former product marketing manager.
“Today, I find myself at a new crossroads as I was part of a recent layoff. While this news is never easy to share, I am grateful for the experiences and connections I have made during my 11 years at Ludia/Jam City,” wrote Tan.
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UI designer Joe Keylon who spent 7 years with the company was also impacted by the layoff. Keylon announced his departure with a post that read, “Unfortunately I was hit by the layoffs at Jam City last week. The Cookie Jam team has some amazing people to work with and we built a ton of great features together.”
GameBaba Universe included the link to the profiles of all the people mentioned in this post so that it will be easy for anyone with open opportunities to reach out to them.
