We’ve learned over the weekend that most of the employees at Heavy Iron – a former THQ subsidiary that’s best-known for its movie tie-in games – may be spending the holiday season looking for a new job.
Sources have told Kotaku that around 60-70% of the studio’s staff are to be laid off this week, most likely on Wednesday. This week being Christmas. With a total headcount of just over 100, that’s a sizable percentage of the studio’s total workforce.
Losing your job is never a good thing, but losing it over Christmas? That makes it twice as hard.
Heavy Iron were once a THQ studio, responsible primarily for games based on Disney/Pixar cartoons, though they also released Evil Dead: Hail to the King. The company were let go from THQ earlier this year as part of the publisher’s cost-cutting measures.
https://lastchance.cc/thq-cuts-down-big-huge-games-lets-go-two-more-5172692%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Update 2: Crisis talks have averted the proposed layoffs, internal sources tell Kotaku, those originally earmarked for the sack instead being kept on temporarily as a “calculated risk” for the company following talks with publishers over the past two weeks.
The status of those employees will be reassessed next month, we are told.
