Orcs Must Die! developer lays off 30 staff to focus on single game

Orcs Must Die! developer Robot Entertainment has laid off more than 30 staff and cut the number of games it's working on from two to one, it has announced.

In a blog post, the company said it "grew significantly" during the development of Orcs Must Die! Unchained, the 2015 entry in the third-person tower defense series, and has since been working on two games. However, it is now "making a strategic shift" to working on a single project, which means cutting its staff numbers.

"Unfortunately, that means we need to resize our team to fit only one project. We’ve made the very difficult decision to let go of over 30 of our very talented and dedicated developers," it said earlier this week. "The coming days will be difficult as we say goodbye to friends and colleagues. We are grateful to have had the opportunity to work with them all."

Its new game will be announced "soon", it added.

Orcs Must Die! Unchained was the first in the series that was free to play, but it attracted far fewer players than its predecessor Orcs Must Die! 2 (roughly 1.1 million players compared to 1.8 million, according to SteamSpy).

Thanks, gamesindustry.biz.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.