Eurocom Closes, Lays Off All Staff

TSA Staff 19 Comments
[drop2]After previous heavy lay offs, in which 150 staff lost their jobs, Eurocom, developer of some of the finest James Bond games for the last couple of generations, has closed shop for good, according to reports currently doing the rounds this afternoon.

That means the remaining fifty or so employees were also let go this morning.

Smith Cooper have been appointed administrators, who closed due to a “severe cash flow shortage”, with the official statement citing a “steep decline” in the sale of console and PC games, with fewer publishers commissioning games at the moment.

Eurocom have also suffered due to competition from other countries with lower costs and those with subsidised games tax credits. The statement also says that there were insufficient funds to pay outstanding wages.

Eurocom were developers for 25 years, first making games for the NES. They were initially responsible for arcade to home console ports, with their Game Boy version of Rodland an early highlight. They handled the great N64 version of Duke 3D, probably the best Harry Potter game (way back on the GameCube) and the recent 007 Legends for current generation machines.

We wish all staff affected the best of luck.

Related stories from TSA

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Game Says Their Sales Skyrocketed For Christmas
UK Games Charts: 29/07/13 – The Last of Us Drops to Third Place
UK Games Charts 28/05/13 – Resident Evil Revelations HD Hits The Top

19 Comments

  1. Same here to the staff, shame this has happen at all let alone before Christmas.

    T_T

  2. Always sad news, particularly with the outstanding wages. Hope they all find employment elsewhere!

  3. That sucks & especially before Christmas too! I wish all those laid off a speedy return to the workplace.

  4. We had someone who had recently been laid off from Eurocom at our college today, giving us a speech on why he should become our new Tutor on our Games Development course (we had to choose between him and one other guy). He actually said that Eurocom has closed down, but it hasn’t been announced yet. I should have sent in a tip!

    In all seriousness though, this is awful news. Hope the staff find work elsewhere, and soon.

    • Your doing games development too? Great, where at though as I’m learning in Wales.

      • In Derby breh. It’s a great course.

      • well I will be doing game story development, Imedia (sound effects), more 3D animation and modelling and concept art after christmas as well as pitching my game idea to the whole class for game design assessment 4, that’s just for the first year too so it’s fair to say that I have @*!% loads of work to do next year and the year after that.

        PS Merry Christmas to all

      • I’m in my second year. First year we had to make a full 3D character model, texture it and make the skeletal mesh for it, we also made a 30 second Chain reaction animation in Maya which we had to model, texture and do our own sounds for, and lastly we made our own game in Gamemaker. My game was good I thought, a 2D platformer where you played as a brain having to avoid scientists and collect water flasks to keep the brain from drying up over time. I should put it up somewhere :’)

      • Cool concept that, my one for games design is (not the assignment one) is Mind Flicked (not F@cked) which is a 2.5D shoot em up, where you play as a Badger wearing a tophat in a spaceship and you have shoot everything and get to the end of every level to stop Death from ending all life on his unicorn motorbike. I came up with this during a group session before getting the second assignment for that unit.

      • Very very creative there breh haha. You will need to show me the finished product when it’s done.

      • Don’t worry I will make it at some point, although I do have ideas that I like to work on as well some of which I shall list below

        1 The Dragon Theif
        2 The Gaelic Ultimatum
        3 The Nexus Guardians
        4 S League Fighters
        5 Sonic Speed ( With SEGA )
        6 Chronicles of Culidia
        7 Flopsy The Psycho Bunny
        and the my best idea yet Segata Sanshiro Returns plus there are billions more where that came from.

  5. It’s a shame it’s happened so close to xmas but hardly suprising given the calibur of games they were making.

  6. always a shame to see a uk studio close down, especially such a long established one as this.

    i guess the just announced games industry tax breaks came too late to save them.

  7. losing your job is a bitch, i can vouch for that (used to work @ ford dagenham)
    but think wolfy nailed it their games were a bit sub par!

  8. 40 Winks and Athens 2004 were my favourite games from them and more recently Disney Universe is great fun too. All the best to everyone

  9. Sad news, i think they were the last game developer here in Derby, now off to join Core Design in the great games development community in the sky.

    Bet they don’t get a road named after them either.

  10. Sucks that it had to happen so close to Christmas. Best of luck to them all.

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