Skydance lays off game developers at Paramount Games and Skydance Interactive a month after its Warner Bros deal

Layoffs have hit Skydance’s game division. Roughly four weeks after Paramount Skydance closed its blockbuster purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery and became Skydance Corporation, the company is cutting game developers, Vertical Slice reports. The report is built on LinkedIn posts from affected staff and their coworkers. Skydance has not announced a headcount, and Vertical Slice says it has asked the company for comment.

The posts paint a wide picture. Paramount Games associate design director David Ballard wrote that his “chapter with Skydance and Paramount came to an end today with a layoff,” adding that several coworkers were affected too. Paramount Games lead engineer David Vera, who said he was not hit “this time,” wrote that Skydance “just lost a ton of great talent” and listed the names of 25 people who appear to have been impacted. Skydance Interactive senior gameplay and game AI programmer Rebecca Vessal said most of her team was let go.

Many of the people affected list Paramount Games, Skydance Interactive, or both on their profiles. That overlap comes from a reshuffle in July, when Paramount merged Skydance Interactive, the studio behind VR games Archangel and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, with Skydance New Media to form Paramount Games. After the Warner Bros. deal closed, the company folded its game teams under a single Skydance Games banner. At the time, president of games and experiences Tony Driscoll said the unified group would work as “one team” to craft “bigger, bolder worlds for fans to explore,” and an internal FAQ said units like WB Games would keep their own brand identity.

The cuts didn’t come out of nowhere. In late October, the Los Angeles Times reported that a memo from David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz offered eligible employees a one-time voluntary buyout and required staff across the company to be in the office five days a week. The memo said, “As we bring our teams together, we recognize that not everyone will see their future here.” Kotaku noted that WB Games had already lost Monolith Productions, Player First Games and Warner Bros. San Diego in closures last year.

What we don’t know yet is the total number of people cut, whether WB Games studios were touched, or which projects are affected. None of the reporting so far answers those questions, and we’ll update if Skydance does.

PPR take: Four weeks. That’s how long “one team” lasted before the first big round of cuts landed on the people who actually make the games. The buyout offer and the five-days-in-office mandate in October looked like the warm-up, and now it’s names on a LinkedIn list. Skydance Interactive made Saints & Sinners one of the best things in VR, and hearing that most of a gameplay team got cut is rough. We’ve been loud about wanting Skydance to do right by fans on Star Trek, and the same goes for the developers in its own building. Owning NetherRealm, Avalanche and a pile of huge IP, as The Brief points out, means nothing if you keep hollowing out the teams. Thoughts are with Ballard, Vessal and everyone on Vera’s list. Hope they land somewhere fast.