Layoffs have been reported at Buenos Aires-based Nimble Giant Entertainment. Sources familiar with the matter told Kotaku that the layoffs happened on January 30, 2024. Also, it was learned that this was the third round of layoffs in the company since last year. The company’s CEO Martin Cao was yet to comment on the layoffs at the time of writing this post.
Nimble Giant Entertainment was founded in 2002 and has grown to become one of the leading game development studios in Latin America. The first major title released by the studio was Champions of Regnum which was considered the first commercial MMORPG to be made in the region.
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However, the studio’s most popular game to date is Star Trek: Infinite, a grand strategy game where each player can create unique stories. Other titles that have been developed by Nimble Giant Entertainment over the years include Master of Orion, Quantum League, Hellbound, and Drone Strike Force.
Nimble Giant Entertainment was acquired by Embracer in 2020. The acquisition was celebrated by Cao at that time saying it was a huge step that would further position the studio as the leading console and PC developer in the region.
“We are super excited and happy to be joining the Embracer Group and Saber Interactive Family today,” Cao wrote on LinkedIn. “A step forward consolidating our position as the leading developer for PC and Console in Latin America and continue our march to become a World Class Game Developer. Good things.”
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The layoff at Nimble Giant is likely connected to the ongoing restructuring program at Embracer Group. Since the Swiss group started the restructuring in June 2023, over a thousand employees have been laid off from Embracer-owned studios. Studios like Volition and Free Radical Designs were shuttered. Embracer was forced to restructure its operations after a $2 billion Saudi funding deal fell through in early 2023.
What former Nimble Giant Entertainment employees are saying
Some of the former employees at Nimble Giant Entertainment have publicly posted about the layoffs that happened in the company. However, GameBaba Universe found some former employees of the studio who did not talk about the layoff but updated their profiles to show they were available to take up new roles.
“In light of the recent layoffs at Nimble Giant Entertainment, I will now be partaking in new and adventurous endeavors in the Games Industry, wrote senior game designer Ulrich Eoforhild. “With my experience at Nimble Giant, I am now looking for novel and interesting challenges!”
Junior Game Designer Jorge Fernandez Meneses published a lengthy post that gave insight into what might have led to the layoffs. According to Meneses, learning that he had been made redundant by the layoffs at Nimble Giant Entertainment left him with a feeling of impotence.
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“We at Next Games spent months barraging publishers with fully fleshed-out game proposals, but it never seemed to be enough,” Meneses wrote on LinkedIn. “’It’s not about the quality of our work; the industry is just in an awful place’. It leaves a bittersweet taste, as I know it has nothing to do with our performance, but it felt like hitting the wall over and over again.”
“I’ve recently been affected by the wave of layoffs that the industry is experiencing, and I find myself looking for employment,” wrote game designer Ramiro Murga-Cerviño Polero. “I’m a mid-level Game Designer who has shipped a AAA game and has a very long trajectory in the field working on personal projects. I’m creative, communicative, willing to learn and teach, and very passionate about what I do.”
GameBaba Universe has included a link to the profiles of impacted employees mentioned in this post to make it easy for anyone with open opportunities to reach out to them. We observed that the majority of those impacted were either in the design or arts department which has further raised an eyebrow on the influence of AI in the game industry.
While many studio executives have claimed that they want to use AI to complement the work of their human staff, the reality is that AI remains undoubtedly one of the reasons for the dizzying wave of layoffs in the game industry.
