Smilegate Barcelona, ??a division of the South Korean video game giant responsible for hits like Lost Ark and Crossfire, is closing its doors. Although the company has yet to make an official announcement, various workers have communicated it on social networks. As La Vanguardia has learned, the company with offices in the Torre Glòries in Barcelona had around seventy workers last year, but has waited until the number of employees has dropped below fifty to carry out the definitive closure.
According to sources close to Smilegate Barcelona, ??the workers were aware of this situation since the end of last year. During these last months, the situation in the company was complicated since many employees had been left without a specific task to work on.
The studio opened its doors in 2020 with the aim of developing a new open-world game with great production values ??– a new “IP” as they say in the video game industry in reference to what is a new “intellectual property.” ”– but due to problems in project management and communication with the South Korean headquarters, this project has not ended up prospering.
As this newspaper has learned, in recent years three different projects have been started and cancelled, something that also caused changes in the management of each of them and, consequently, a clear lack of leadership in the Barcelona division of Smilegate.
The studio’s narrative director, Stephane Blais, broke the news in a message on his LinkedIn page: “As our industry begins to look more and more like a game Sink the Fleet, it’s our turn to get hit. “All employees are being laid off.”
“The last six months have been quite intense, but they allowed me to discover a fantastic and really dedicated team. They all work very hard to try to save it,” continues the message from Blais, who had previously worked on successful titles such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in Ubisoft or Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy at Eidos Montreal.
The video game sector has been going through a major international crisis for a few months now. The saturation of the market caused by the large supply of games, the decreasing purchasing power of players, the ability of the big titles (Fortnite, PUBG) to retain users and the erratic planning of many companies during the pandemic – in which video game consumption skyrocketed – are some of the causes of this situation.
This 2024, the video game industry will already accumulate more than 8,000 layoffs and dozens of studio closures, although the most notable cases have been those of the video game divisions of Microsoft and Sony, which have laid off 1,900 and 900 so far this year. workers, respectively. A crisis that is also affecting the Spanish video game industry, as exemplified by the recent closure of the veteran company Novarama.
