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Perfect World has reportedly laid off staff from its Amsterdam office.
As reported by Dutch site Control (thanks, GI.biz), the company has not disclosed how many staff have been affected for “privacy reasons”, but it’s reported that staff right across the organisation have been let go, including designers, marketing staff, and community managers. According to the reports, all staff affected were informed via one-to-one meetings yesterday (January 15th), with only staff in finance, customer support and localisation support thought to have been spared.
“Perfect World Entertainment has recently made a number of organisational changes that have affected a small number of employees at our office in Amsterdam,” a statement said. “Although this was not an easy decision, this change will make our business more efficient and flexible in an ever-changing, competitive market.
“We are grateful for all contributions from the employees involved and we wish them all the best in their future challenges. Perfect World Entertainment remains committed to providing players with the best live service experience and our final business decision will enable us to maintain our momentum and deliver on our promises to gamers.”
Chinese publisher Perfect World also made cuts back in 2017.
These latest layoffs sadly come on the back of several other closures and cutbacks we’ve seen across studios in recent months, most recently Fantasy Flight Interactive, Gameloft, Amazon Game Studios and PayDay developer, Starbreeze.
“It’s with great sadness that I have to report that the decision has been made to close Fantasy Flight Interactive next month,” Fantasy Flight Interactive studio head, Gerritsen, explained via a LinkedIn post at the time. “I’m proud of the team and the game we’ve dedicated ourselves to for the past few years. It’s been an amazing journey with even more amazing people.
“I’m going to do my best to get my team placed in new positions. I have programmers, designers, artists, QA staff and a producer to get placed in new roles and will do my best to do so quickly. Additionally, I’m now open to new opportunities myself since I will also be out of a job.”
Other recent layoffs and closures include Iron Tiger Studios, ArenaNet, Next Games, Forgotten Key, Define Human Studios, Bandai Namco Vancouver, and Trion Worlds. Telltale Games also laid off its staff in a studio closure back in September 2018.
Update 20 Jan 2020: An original version of this story ran with the headline: “Perfect World makes ‘uneasy decision’ to shutter Amsterdam office”. As the office hasn’t been closed down entirely, this has now been amended.
