Ubisoft asks Star Wars Outlaws devs to lay themselves off

For years, there have been brutal cutbacks in the gaming industry, with people losing their jobs left and right, studios closing down, and projects being cancelled. Many also testify to a lower willingness to take risks with new projects, which in plain language means more sequels and safe bets over titles that break new ground.

One of the companies affected is Ubisoft, and they are clearly not done yet. They do, however, seem to want to proceed more cautiously rather than resorting to widespread layoffs. Now, their Swedish flagship developer Massive Entertainment (The Division 2, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora) has written a post on social media full of corpo-newspeak saying that they have introduced a voluntary redundancy program in order to get rid of surplus staff to be able to focus more on The Division series and the Snowdrop game engine.

It seems likely that Massive Entertainment will be more reluctant to take on projects such as Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora in the future, and the question is whether they will even have the resources to do so now that they are likely to lose staff.