Kotaku is reporting that Rockstar have laid off 40 employees, most of whom had worked on Red Dead Redemption. The game shifted over 1.5 million copies (and received a glowing 10/10 score from us) – but Kotaku claim that a “significant chunk of Rockstar San Diego was let go earlier today,” just two months after the game was released.
A statement from Rockstar San Diego’s Steve Martin this morning backs up the claim. “As is typical with game development,” he says, “our team sizes have always fluctuated over the course of the development cycle. As Rockstar San Diego transitions from the launch of Red Dead Redemption onto future projects, we are realigning our resources in order to continue to develop games as effectively as possible.”
“We are ensuring that all employees who are affected by these changes are being treated with care,” continues Martin. “While we have no announcements to make regarding a sequel to Red Dead Redemption, the team here are hard at work on the development of downloadable content for the game.”
Perhaps the studio hired lots of staff to ensure the game finally got released, and then cut back on numbers to concentrate on the DLC, although comments on the Kotaku piece suggest otherwise. “There a lot of guys that have been working there for over 10 years that got laid off,” says one reader.
exodark
Why hasn’t anyone mentioned the fact that these were the same people that embarrassed rockstar months before their game release? Well, their wives embarrassed them anyway. With that letter depicting horrible work environments? Anyone remember that? Sounds like retaliation to me.