Yooka-Laylee developer Playtonic confirms layoffs: 'The landscape is shifting, and with it, so must we'
Yooka-Laylee developer Playtonic Games has laid off an undisclosed number of employees, confirming reports of cuts shared by former employees on social media over the past week.
"We've all seen in recent years how the games industry has been changing, resulting in studio after studio finding themselves in situations where to continue to exist, they must make painful decisions—decisions that impact the lives of so many individual talented developers," Playtonic said in today's statement. "Like others, we've felt the knock-on effects and after exploring every possible avenue, we've had to make the incredibly heartbreaking decision to say goodbye to some truly brilliant members of the Playtonic team.
"This isn't simply a difficult moment, it's a period of profound change in how games are created and financed. The landscape is shifting, and with it, so must we."
Playtonic didn't say how many people have been put out of work. However, brand manager Anni Valkama listed 14 employees impacted by the cuts, across production, art, and design teams, in a message posted to LinkedIn.
Playtonic was founded in 2014 by former Rare employees, and released Yooka-Laylee, a spiritual successor to Banjo Kazooie, in 2017. Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair followed in 2019, and that's pretty much been it: A publishing division, Playtonic Friends, launched in early 2021, and Tencent invested in Playtonic late that same year. A new Yooka-Laylee game, Yooka-Replaylee, is currently slated for release this year, while the new game under the Playtonic Friends label, Cattle Country—developed by Castle Pixel—arrived earlier this week.
The layoffs at Playtonic continue a crisis in the game development industry that began with 2023 and continues unabated: Earlier this week, Electronic Arts cancelled the Black Panther game that's been in development since 2023 and closed Cliffhanger Games, the studio making it; less than a month prior to that it laid off a reported 300-400 employees while cancelling two "incubation projects" at Respawn. 2025 has also seen layoffs at Ubisoft, Cyan Worlds, Mighty Yell, Eidos Montreal, engine maker Unity, and others.