Skydance Games Lays Off Staff a Month After Closing Its Warner Bros. Discovery Merger
Just over a month after Paramount closed its roughly $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and renamed itself Skydance, the company’s games division has laid off staff. Reports of the cuts first surfaced on LinkedIn on November 6, where multiple employees said they had been let go, and Skydance later confirmed the layoffs in a statement shared with Variety.
The Cuts Hit Skydance’s Own Studios First
The layoffs landed at Skydance’s own game teams, including the studio behind The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, rather than the former Warner Bros. Games studios. Senior gameplay and game AI programmer Rebecca Vessal said most of her team at Skydance Interactive had been let go that day, while lead engineer David Vera, who kept his job, publicly vouched for several of the departing gameplay designers, level designers, and artists.
“Skydance just lost a ton of great talent yesterday.”
David Vera, lead engineer at Skydance, via LinkedIn
A report based on accounts from multiple affected employees put the total at at least 30 people across a range of roles, with the real figure believed to be higher. Skydance itself has not given an exact number. Studios on the Warner Bros. side of the merger, including Avalanche Software, NetherRealm Studios, Rocksteady Studios, and TT Games, don’t appear to have been affected so far, and it remains unclear whether Skydance New Media’s own projects lost any staff.
Skydance Interactive, the VR studio behind Skydance’s BEHEMOTH and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, is among the teams affected by this week’s cuts.
A Statement, and a Warning That Came With the Deal
In its statement to Variety, Skydance said it had stepped back to consider where it was investing its efforts and made the difficult decision to scale down some of its projects, adding that the move reflects reorganization and operational shifts across a few areas of the business rather than the performance of those affected. The company framed the cuts as part of positioning Skydance Games for long-term growth, and said it was approaching the departures with transparency and care.
The layoffs aren’t entirely a surprise. When the deal officially closed on October 6, CEO David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz told staff in a Day One memo that integrating the two companies would bring changes, including difficult decisions affecting the workforce. A follow-up memo on October 26 offered some employees a voluntary buyout and moved the combined company to five days a week in the office, as Skydance targets more than $6 billion in annual cost savings within three years. Paramount Games Studio, the unit that combined Skydance Interactive and Skydance New Media back in June, was folded into a single division alongside Warner Bros. Games just last month, with Tony Driscoll put in charge of the combined studio lineup.
What’s Still on the Slate
The combined division’s highest-profile upcoming releases, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin from PlatinumGames and Skydance New Media’s Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra and an untitled Star Wars game, were all still described as in development as of this past June. None of the public LinkedIn posts from affected staff have indicated whether those specific projects lost any team members, and Skydance hasn’t said whether further consolidation across the newly merged studios will follow.
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Picture Source: Skydance Interactive, Skydance Interactive
