Smilegate Barcelona, the studio established in 2020 to develop an open-world AAA console title, has reportedly been closed and all employees let go.

[Gamernyc78]

Right, but like I said it has been much more layoffs than closures.

For closures you have the Blizzard survival game (might as well be a closure due to team size), potentially a similar result at Sledgehammer Australia, who were working on a "new IP" when owned by Activision (we never got clarification there on whether MS kept it going but I doubt it), Ridgeline from EA, Sony London, Deviation games and then this group which Yurinka claims didn't even have a staff of over 100 so I don't know how you can claim their project was AAA.

Pound for pound we lost more studios last year and, due to Embracer, the indication is that we pound for pound lost more games too.

Ahhhhh I see your point. I wasn't distinguishing between closures and layoffs, copy.

 

[Yurinka]

and then this group which Yurinka claims didn't even have a staff of over 100 so I don't know how you can claim their project was AAA.

I'm just quoting the company, they are the ones claiming it was an open world AAA game.

Regarding the amount of people, a trusted journalist say they closed being 50 and that last year were around 70. I know at some point they were over 100 people.

The trusted journalist says they started 3 projects but none of them seemed to properly work, so pretty likely they didn't scale more because of that.

In any case, the team in a lead studio of a AAA title normally has around 100-250 people, and the total team size who work in the game is around ten times that.

This wasn't a big studio for the AAA standards, but were working on AAA stuff.

The studio closure doesn't seem related to the crisis, but because 5 years after opening the studio they still had a lack of clear vision, direction issues and communication issues with the HQ. So I assume it was basically a management issue and the HQ ran out of patience.