Sega of America has warned employees that it will lay off 61 of its staffers by March 8, 2024.
The notice, found via the state of California's WARN act (which requires employers to give affected employees a 60-day notice before enacting mass layoffs) website and shared by the X/Twitter account @WhatLayoff, mentions that the company intends to lay off 49 employees in one of its offices in Irvine and 12 in the other.
At the moment, no details have been shared about the reasons behind the layoffs or which departments are affected.
This comes right after the release of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, which has proven quite successful with "very positive" reviews on Steam and nearly 50,000 peak concurrent users according to monitoring site SteamDB.
The team at Sega of America promoted the latest game by the acclaimed Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio quite intensively, likely contributing in no small measure to that success, so it's quite sad to see them affected.
We reached out to the company seeking a statement on the issue, and we'll update this article if we receive anything in response.
This is just the latest of many instances of mass layoffs and closures that have hit the gaming industry over the last several months at publishers and developers both large and small, in what appears to be one of the world periods in recent memory.
Among the thousands of employees affected we saw people working at Microsoft, Riot Games, Sony, Bungie, Epic Games, Tencent, Amazon, Frontier, Team17, on top of many of Embracer's studios affected to various extents including Eidos Montreal, Volition, Cryptic Studios, New World Interactive, Free Radical, 3D Realms/Slipgate Ironworks, and Lost Boys Interactive.
Sega itself laid off an undisclosed number of employees in 2023 at its European arm following the cancellation of a number of projects including the multiplayer shooter Hyenas.
