» Lionhead Studios Announce Job CutsLionhead Studios Announce Job Cuts

March 6th, 2006 by Sean in Game Development Insights

The games industry continues it’s current round of belt tightening with the news that Lionhead, creators of Black & White and The Movies, is to cut 50 jobs.

The studio, headed by industry legend Peter Molyneux, announced on Friday that worse the expected performance of Black & White 2 and The Movies meant that the company would need to downsize in order to keep operating efficiently. The company will now only be working on two projects simultaneously, with a small additional prototyping team. Unfortunately the scaling back meant there would have to be some redundancies, and 50 people are set to lose their jobs. This represents around a 20% cull of staff, with the company having employed 250 people up until now.

This news follows the news earlier in the year of job cuts at various publishers including Activision and EA among others, cuts taken as a measure to help ride out the transition year as the next generation of consoles are launched.

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One Comment on “Lionhead Studios Announce Job Cuts”

» Microsoft Buy Lionhead » Game Addicts Says:

April 7th, 2006 at 8:44 am

[...] As we reported a month ago, Lionhead have recently made a round of redundancies after their latest titles failed to live up to expectations, so the sale to Microsoft will probably be a good thing for the company in terms of stability for future growth. No figure has been disclosed as to the cost of the sale, but given the afore mentioned difficulties Lionhead faced it’s assumed that Microsoft may have landed themselves somewhat of a bargain. [...]