Update: Toys for Bob not shutting down

[John Elden Ring]

- Not shutting down

- Downsized from 86 to 50 people

- Office is closing as the rent lease was running out; too expensive to keep for 50 people

- Toys For Bob going fully remote; wanted to go remote themselves, not Microsoft

- New projects in the works

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Still not great news. Whatever projects they're working on, will be very small in scale, and/or leverage a ton of temp contract workers meaning quality is potentially very questionable.

Also IIRC most of the studio now is remote WFH; that may be good in terms of fitting around different lifestyles, but not having a main physical location to meet up at and work in, even for a bit, could become demoralizing to longer-term motivation and energy/effort among some of the team members.

I guess we'll see how everything pans out :/

 

[Bryank75]

Not too enthused bout the whole thing, even with this update. Doesn't sound like a team in this setup.

 

[Entropi]

All things considered, I’m glad they are still around, and I hope they are making something not related to Call of Duty.

 

[Nhomnhom]

Not shutting down, for now.

Anyway, if they make another Crash game it will show up on PlayStation, but my money is on MS completely destroying them. At least they already ported the classic Crash games that are pretty much all that matters anyway.

 

[anonpuffs]

How can they have downsized from 86 to 50 people when they were like 150? Were they cut in half already? Or were 86 cut and now they're 50?

 

[MaxParrish]

How can they have downsized from 86 to 50 people when they were like 150? Were they cut in half already? Or were 86 cut and now they're 50?

Wikipedia size the team at 180 in 2021 and I' m pretty sure that when the rumours pf closure of the studio were first negated, they initially told that tere were still 80 employee s working remotely This was like, maybe, 10 days ago...

 

[lynux3]

Hopefully they’re beginning the Banjo Kazooie remake now.

 

[Shadow2027]

Still not great news. Whatever projects they're working on, will be very small in scale, and/or leverage a ton of temp contract workers meaning quality is potentially very questionable.

Also IIRC most of the studio now is remote WFH; that may be good in terms of fitting around different lifestyles, but not having a main physical location to meet up at and work in, even for a bit, could become demoralizing to longer-term motivation and energy/effort among some of the team members.

I guess we'll see how everything pans out :/

As someone with many fully remote co-workers, holy shit productiveness is gonna tank very hard. Great for the workers, but don’t expect people to get their shit done timely