Layoffs at Gearbox-owned studio Lost Boys said to be “massive”

Embracer is continuing right where it left off last year

Marco Wutz | Jan 15, 2024

Layoffs at Gearbox-owned studio Lost Boys said to be “massive” /

A “sizable” amount of employees were let go by development studio Lost Boys Interactive this past Friday, according to a report by Aftermath based on a number of posts by those affected.

Working as a support studio on games like Diablo 4 and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands Lost Boys was acquired by Gearbox in 2022, which roughly doubled the studio’s total workforce from over 200 to more than 400 employees. Gearbox itself, of course, is owned by Embracer Group, which is on a mission to massively cut costs at the moment.

Tiny Tina from Tiny Tina's Wonderlands holding an axe. — Embracer continues to be the grim reaper for gaming jobs / Gearbox

In November 2023, the terrifying tally of this program was already at over 900 terminated jobs. Studios like Volition, Campfire Cabal, and Free Radical Design were closed outright during this thorough restructuring effort.

Severe cuts have been made at New World Interactive ahead of the holiday season as well and it looks like the measures at Lost Boys are similar – not a total closure, but a massive trimming of manpower. There currently is no information of the exact scale of these terminations, only that affected workers called them “massive” and “sizable,” saying that no divisions or experience levels remained unaffected.

These layoffs rounded out another disastrous week in the tech and gaming industries for many former employees with similar actions at Unity, Twitch, and Discord.

Borderlands 4 and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands 2 could be in the works

Published Jan 15, 2024

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg