February is starting off with reports of more games industry layoffs, this time at Jeff Strain’s Crop Circle Games.
According to a report over at Game Developer, several former Crop Circle employees have updated their LinkedIn profiles with news of layoffs and notices that they are seeking work. The independent development studio was announced back in 2022 as the latest studio from Strain, who co-founded ArenaNet and Undead Labs, and spent time at Blizzard during a lengthy career in the industry.
Crop Circle Games, founded under Prytania Media, is a fully remote distributed team, with a number of industry veterans at its founding and still listed on its current roster. The team is working on a still-unannounced first project. While some may have hoped that the difficult year of contraction in the games industry in 2023 might slow down as we hit a new year, the painful cuts have continued.
While there do seem to be some layoffs at Crop Circle Games, their scope isn’t clear just yet. Jeff Strain himself had advocated for employees in the industry to unionize back in 2021. Those comments came after Activision Blizzard was sued in a major workplace discrimination and harassment lawsuit by California. At the time, Strain said that
“We need unionization.
Unions were started in this country to protect workers from abusive, cruel, abhorrent, unacceptable and illegal treatment from companies. That’s their entire purpose. If this week does not show us that our industry colleagues — even the most entry-level QA tester — need true support and baseline protection, I can’t imagine how much worse it will have to get.”
With those words and the very painful layoffs across the industry over the past year, with no end in sight, Crop Circle Games looks to sadly be the latest to experience sudden layoffs.
