Immutable Games Studio is letting go of several employees, including one of its senior game designers, amid a slump in crypto prices.
James Wakeham worked as lead designer on Immutable’s crypto game called Gods Unchained, a blockchain-based digital trading card game. On Twitter, he recently stated that he “and a bunch of people” were let go and that Wakeham is now looking for a new job.
The layoffs were announced Monday at an all-hands meeting and affected 6% of the company’s workforce.
After its last fundraising round in which it secured $200 million, Immutable the spying a value of 2.5 billion dollars. It’s the startup behind Immutable X, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution designed for gaming and NFTsused by firms including TikTok and GameStopwhich recently launched an NFT marketplace.
Immutable CEO and co-founder James Ferguson told employees the company remains in “a fantastic position,” according to reports from CNET.
Elsewhere, Immutable has made it clear that despite the recent layoffs, it has no plans to slow down on hiring new staff, especially when it comes to working on Gods Unchained, or its upcoming action role-playing game Guild of Guardians, in development by Stepico Games.
“We are actively increasing hiring across product, engineering and tokenomics at Gods Unchained as we focus on scaling it to the mainstream and beyond,” said a spokesperson from Immutable’s US branch. Kotaku Australia.
“We’ve made the decision to undertake a slight reorganization within Gods Unchained to help us better achieve our goal of creating the next generation of web3 games,” the spokesperson said.
Immutable has grown to 280 employees from 180 at the beginning of this year, according to the spokesperson. And they said the Australia-based company is “on track” to increase its headcount to 360 employees in the next five months.
On Twitter, Wakeham explained why he was let go in response to a user who didn’t understand the company’s decision and questioned Immutable’s finances.
“They have a very long runway,” Wakeham said. “They decided that a bunch of the people who worked on the game didn’t support where the product needed to go next.”
Immutable joins the growing list of crypto terminations
Immutable’s decision to reduce the number of employees comes amid a series of layoffs from companies in the cryptocurrency industry.
Several firms have cited the ongoing crypto winter for making moves to let people go, and that business operations have been negatively impacted by the declining price of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets.
While the global cryptocurrency market reached an all-time high of $2.9 trillion in market capitalization in November 2021, it has since fallen to just over $1 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap.
[BITCOIN PRICE]
The price of Bitcoin is down 68% from a peak of just over $67,500 — set the same month — to around $21,300 at press time, according to CoinMarketCap.
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