Last month, Xbox announced its intention to close Hellblade developer Ninja Theory, after two deals to save the company didn’t pan out. Now we’re starting to see the consequences of that decision as people at the studio post on job site LinkedIn, spotted by journalist Chris Kerr.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to write this because Ninja Theory was never just a job to me,” gameplay programmer Katrin Mair said. “After four years, it’s hard to put into words how much this place and the people in it have meant to me.
“What I’ll remember most is how much people cared. About the work, about the details, and about each other. I feel very lucky that this was the place where I got to start my career and grow into the programmer I am today. It’s incredibly sad knowing that we won’t get to finish what we were working on. So much care, talent and effort went into it, and I really wish we’d had the chance to see what it could have become.”
Mair moved to the U.K. to work at Ninja Theory. Elsewhere, technical director Loong-Wei Ding is among those affected, with his leaving post calling for other studios to pick up his Ninja Theory colleagues.
Expert technical sound designer Alessio Mellina is also at risk of redundancy after 12 years with the studio working on the industry-leading binaural audio that powered Hellblade’s haunting whispers. “As the only Technical Sound Designer here, I’ve been the owner of most of our dynamic audio systems on recent projects,” he said.
Performance capture expert Xoe Suvari has also been let go. “Hundreds of shoot days,” he said. “Hours and hours of data. Sweat and bruises from set builds. New pipelines and the never ending battle of naming conventions. I saw my team grow at work and as people, and together we built a performance capture stage that was truly top of its class.”
All of the posts talk about their colleagues, suggesting layoffs are widespread throughout the studio. In June, at an Xbox Games Showcase event, Microsoft announced Senua, the third game in the Hellblade series. It’s widely speculated that the trailer was intended to increase interest with potential buyers of Ninja Theory, since Microsoft would have known at this point that it had no plans to publish the title.
Last month, Microsoft announced that the next mainline Halo game will be developed by Call of Duty maker Activision, with mass layoffs hitting Halo Studios. Xbox has moved Age of Empires developer World’s Edge and Sea of Thieves developer Rare under the Activision umbrella.
Outside Activision, Obsidian, developer of Grounded and The Outer Worlds is now a Bethesda studio, as it begins work on a new Fallout game. According to Xbox Chief Content Officer Matt Booty, these changes bring us three quarters of the way through planned restructures, which suggests more job losses will happen over the course of the next few months.
