Oblivion Remastered studio is reportedly laying off 300 people

‪Gauthier 'Gautoz' Andres, co-founder of French videogame website Origami, has reported on Bluesky that "Mass layoffs are underway at Virtuos, the studio behind Oblivion Remastered and the upcoming Metal Gear Solid Δ."

Virtuos is a co-development studio that has contributed to everything from Dark Souls Remastered to Age of Mythology Retold, and is currently working with CD Projekt Red on the neverending cycle of Cyberpunk 2077 updates. It's got offices around the world and apparently enough staff that the 300 people Andres reports are at risk make up only "7% of the workforce". Still, it's got to be rough to be one of the people waiting to hear the bad news when you worked on Oblivion Remastered, one of the year's best-selling games.

"Virtuos is said to have made significant efforts on Oblivion," Andres writes, via Google Translate, "with a policy of over-quality relative to the budget and a contract without royalties (without bonuses indexed to the game's success). The result: teams put to the test for a purely showcase game, doomed to see its profitability questioned."

Maybe in another climate that would have worked out, with enough new projects won on the back of that success to keep the ball rolling. But given that even a successful company like Microsoft is laying off 9,000 people, presumably there aren't as many of those big co-development projects going as you might have expected back when you signed the contract.

Regarding the "contract without royalties", over on Resetera an ex-employee of Virtuos explained there are "almost never" royalties for projects like this, because if a studio insists on them they'll be underbid by one that doesn't. It really sounds like a lose-lose deal. You put in the work on a portfolio-enhancing project, and still lose your job because the industry decides to have another year of belt-tightening. Just another foolproof way to get laid off in the games industry, I guess.