Layoffs at Toys for Bob and Sledgehammer Games will affect 30% to 40% of employees

Toys for Bob, the developer of Crash Bandicoot, and Sledgehammer Games, one of the studios working on the Call of Duty franchise, will be two of the companies most affected by Microsoft’s layoffs this week.

Some sources suggest that both studios lost between thirty and forty percent of their staff. In the case of Toys for Bob, this figure would be around thirty-five employees, while in the case of Sledgehammer Games, a much larger studio, this number would rise to one hundred fifty to three hundred employees.

This week, Microsoft decided to shed 1,900 employees from its video games division, mainly affecting Activision Blizzard (a company it completed acquiring in late 2023), as well as Xbox and Zenimax.

The Redmond-based company’s move is yet another one in 2024 that started even worse than it ended last year, 2023, which ended with the loss of more than ten thousand jobs in the video game industry. Less than a month into 2024, more than five thousand layoffs have already occurred, affecting companies such as Riot Games, Unity, CI Games, Behavior Interactive or Black Forest Games, not counting Microsoft itself.

A few weeks ago, the GDC (Game Developers Conference) released its report on the state of the video game industry in 2024. In it, thirty-five percent of those surveyed had been affected in some way by layoffs over the past twelve months. , and half said they were concerned the trend would continue in the future.