Update: Crystal Dynamics has confirmed in a statement posted to social media that it has laid off ten employees.
"Crystal Dynamics made the difficult decision to part ways with 9 Brand/Marketing and 1 IT employee today due to an internal restructuring to align the studio with our current business needs," the company says. "We are working directly with the affected staff to fully support them. If you have applicable positions open at your studio across Brand Direction, Creative Services, Community, or IT, please pass them along to [email protected] and we will ensure the information ends up in the right hands."
Original story: Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics has suffered a wave of layoffs just months after insisting that the ongoing staff hemorrhage at parent company Embracer Group wouldn't affect the new Tomb Raider game or the studio's collaboration with The Initiative on the Perfect Dark reboot.
Several Crystal Dynamics employees confirmed the layoffs on social media today, and while marketing and branding folks seem to have drawn the shortest straw, the exact scope of the redundancies remains uncertain. Senior brand manager Nick Edwards writes: "Sadly the Embracer layoffs keep coming and I and a number of talented brand/marketing folks at Crystal are impacted."
Senior community and social manager Neha Nair adds: "There isn't an easy way to say this so I'll just rip the bandaid off because while I'm still processing, life unfortunately does not pause... After 3.5 years at [Crystal Dynamics], I was laid off today."
Updates on other platforms like LinkedIn show several other members of senior staff, including communications director Adam Kahn, have been let go. Crystal Dynamics has yet to release a public statement on the layoffs, and the only word from Embracer Group today has been a rescheduling of its stakeholder-facing capital markets day on account of "the restructuring program launched on June 13, which will run until March 31, 2024."
In June, Crystal Dynamics said that despite escalating Embrace layoffs, "there will be no impact to our continuing efforts with our partners at The Initiative on Perfect Dark, or our next Tomb Raider title being developed in collaboration with Amazon Games." It's unclear if this statement remains true after today's cuts.
The affected members of Crystal Dynamics are only the latest to be hurled out by Embracer in order to help keep its ship above water. The company's "restructuring," you'll recall, followed a failed $2 billion deal with Saudi Arabia, and has since seen the shuttering of 30-year-old Saints Row developer Volition, layoffs across a range of studios, and the rumored pawning of Borderlands developer Gearbox.
In a June statement, Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors noted that "Embracer currently engages close to 17,000 people and while that number will be lower by the end of the year, it is too early to give an exact forecast on this."
Crystal Dynamics just recently unveiled the Tomb Raider Remastered trilogy, which is coming to all platforms on Lara Croft's next birthday, February 14, 2024.
