Tennis Clash and Zooba maker Wildlife has laid off a significant number of staff in Brazil and Argentina.
The redundancies are part of a move to cancel all “initiatives outside the mobile game space”, the company told us.
LinkedIn posts from staff describe the layoffs as “massive”, and documents seen by mobilegamer.biz suggest the layoffs total almost 300 staff.
Wildlife sent us the following statement, confirming the layoffs:
“Today, Wildlife reduced its team size. We have stopped our initiatives outside the mobile game space to increase our focus on what has made the company successful, game development.”
“We are grateful to the team members that have helped us get to where we are and we are working to help them find new opportunities.”
We have asked for more detail on the number of staff affected and will update this story if and when we receive it.
From the documents we’ve seen, the layoffs appear to be focused on Wildlife’s studios in Brazil and Argentina, and include staff from across the business. Roles made redundant include positions in engineering, UX, art, product management, game design, animation, data science, QA, recruitment and business analysis.
Wildlife has been investing heavily in new studios in recent months. It announced the formation of new Helsinki studio Stellar Core last month, led by former Supercell and Seriously folks Touko Tahkokallio and Serdar Soganci.
Wildlife also recently announced new Stockholm studio 8-Bit Bandits, which is led by ex-King duo Robert Woodburn and Stephen Jarrett. They most recently worked together on Crash: On the Run.
On top of Stellar Core and 8-Bit Bandits, Wildlife has funded five more new studios in the last year: Never Forget (Led by EA and Zynga veterans Ray Mazza and Mike Duke), Superwow (Ex-Real Racing 3 boss Lu Gigliotti), Foxbear (Former Marvel Strike Force director Jonathan Durr), Moon Tavern (Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, Words With Friends, Top Eleven veterans Justin Jones and Marta Velasco) and Playabit (Toy Blast and Toon Blast creators Tugrul Atak, Ayhan Sahin and Ant Sengelli)
According to Appmagic data, Wildlife’s top earning games to date include Sniper 3D ($296m), War Machines ($162m), Colorfy ($130m), Zooba ($90m) and Tennis Clash ($87m).
