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Around 7% of the global workforce has been let go.
"Hello everyone and welcome back to another GRTV News.
Today we're going to be talking a little bit about the developer known as Virtuos, who has become a bit of a master at remakes, or high quality remasters, however you want to look at it."
"The reason we're talking about Virtuos today is because the studio has been hit by layoffs, and it's quite a surprising situation really, because Virtuos just recently launched The Elder Scrolls Online, The Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion Remastered, and they are involved in Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater as well, which is coming out later this, well, at the end of August."
"And the point is that both, well, at least Elder Scrolls did apparently rather well, and apparently a lot of people played it, but clearly that wasn't good enough for Virtuos' expectations.
You have to wonder whether the Game Pass split applies to that a little bit.
But anyway, the point is that the developer has been hit by layoffs, around 7% of the workforce has been released from their roles, which equates to a good amount of developers as well, because Virtuos is quite a big studio."
"So let's take a look.
Oblivion Remastered studio lays off 7% of workforce.
Despite recent high profile projects in global expansion, Virtuos has announced significant layoffs.
So Virtuos, best known for its work on remasters like Oblivion and Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater, has announced that it's cutting 300 jobs."
"This amounts to around 7% of the company's 4,200 employees, with most affected roles reportedly located in its offices in China and France.
According to reports, the success of Oblivion Remastered has not translated into meaningful revenue for the company, despite strong sales that launched in the weeks following."
"It's also possible that the broader wave of layoffs at Microsoft may have had some ripple effects on Virtuos as a partner studio.
Virtuos has recently undergone significant expansion, opening new offices in Japan, Ukraine and Malaysia, and taken on a more integrated development role in several high profile titles.
Its teams have contributed to major projects, including Update 2.3 for Cyberpunk 2077."
"The company is now laying off such a substantial portion of its workforce as yet another sobering reminder that job security in the games industry is increasingly precarious, no matter how successful the studio might seem from the outside.
So yeah, that's the interesting thing to me is they mentioned that the game, that the Elder Scrolls Online Oblivion Remastered for one, had a pretty decent launch and strong sales, but it didn't have meaningful revenue, which is quite an unusual way to frame it, I think."
"I think that maybe that shows that Game Pass isn't necessarily proving to be successful for a lot of third party developers.
First party's a different story because obviously they're owned by Microsoft and they can incorporate the costs in a different way, but maybe for third party it doesn't quite add up in the same way."
"But again, Virtuos, and I talked about this relatively recently about video game industry and perhaps maybe some of these have changed.
Virtuos is a studio that does a lot of these supportive roles, does all these, again, a remaster of the Elder Scrolls, helping with the remake of Metal Gear Solid Delta, helping with CD Projekt Red getting a new Cyberpunk update over the line."
"Has its hands in lots of different pies, and yet it's a studio that has around 4,200 employees across the world.
It's not a small team, this is a big team.
This is a team that can rival some of the biggest AAA developers out there, and it doesn't necessarily occupy a role in the same sort of space as them."
"So you do have to wonder maybe if there's a bit of bloat going on.
Either way, 7% of the workforce losing their jobs is a big amount.
300 people is no small number to snuff out either.
And no doubt in the immediate future we'll figure out the exact nature of this layoff and how it's going to affect projects in the future."
"But yeah, we're going from a studio that's around 4,200 employees inside to something that's just under 4,000 now.
So still a very, very, very big team, which means these games, when they do come out, have to be pretty damn successful for Virtuos to be able to continue playing salaries and all that good stuff."
"But yeah, that's all the time that I have on today's episode of GOTV News, but I'll be back tomorrow for the final one of the week.
So thank you for watching, I'll see you all on that one.
Take care, everyone."
