LogInA dark day in the history of A Hat in Time and Slay the Spire publisher.
Gears for Breakfast
The past 24 hours undoubtedly mark the darkest moment in the history of Humble Games, an indie game publisher known for titles such as A Hat in Time and Slay the Spire, as the studio saw its entire 36-person workforce fired by Ziff Davis, owner of Humble Bundle and the company behind gaming media giants like IGN, Eurogamer, and Rock Paper Shotgun.
Shortly before the company released its official announcement, several now-former Humble Games workers took to social media to disclose the layoffs to the public themselves, stating that every staff member had lost their job and claiming the company itself had shut down. Other employees went a step further and hinted at the reasons behind the firings, suggesting that, non-surprisingly, corporate greed and the relentless pursuit of quick profits were the main motivators for Ziff's execs.
"The game industry is volatile, it's been inundated by people who only want exponential growth at the expense of making great games with great teams," commented Humble Games' ex-Senior QA, Emilee Kieffer. "Billionaires and CEOs are making record profits at the expense of the employees who actually create the products. But I believe we have the power to create studios that benefit us as game developers and not people that only see us as money-printing machines."
When said social media posts began gaining traction online and stealing the headlines, Ziff Davis was quick to publish an official announcement via HG's official Twitter page, calling the termination of the entire workforce "restructuring".
As is often the case with such "layoff announcements", the main goal seemed to be minimizing backlash rather than revealing any meaningful information on the firings, with the company providing the audience with nothing but three paragraphs of what is likely AI-generated text rambling on about how this was a "difficult but necessary decision" and how they're going to "assist former team members with as much empathy and understanding as possible". If you've seen one of them, you've seen all of them.
Following the publication of Ziff's statement, Chris Radley, a former Creative Lead at Humble Games and a person familiar with the publisher's inner workings, urged the community not to believe "this AI message", reaffirming that it is indeed a total shutdown of Humble Games and not "restructuring":
"Operations have been handed off to a third-party consultancy. No staff are left," Radley said in a LinkedIn post. "This was once again a failure of leadership across the board, and once again hard-working talented staff are paying the cost for their poor decisions. Every ex-employee is being gaslit by this narrative and it's so disrespectful."
A couple of ex-Humble Games staff members further confirmed to Aftermath that the decision to fire the entire workforce was purely financially motivated, adding that Ziff Davis doesn’t understand game development and was trying to apply the same approaches and business models it uses for its media platforms:
"Ziff is very good at owning a lot of media and increasing revenue in advertising, and Humble Games publishing was just not something that agreed with their business model. They needed money. They needed it now. They wanted to see an immediate increase in revenue after investing cash into a business, and unfortunately, that's just not how games work.
Ziff Davis does not understand the world of game development – and the principle that when you invest money, a game is not released in six months but takes time to be done – and were starting to not like this when they understood its workings, so with their stock going down, they simply decided they did not want to be in that business anymore."
At the moment, the fate of Humble Games' upcoming games, such as Lost Skies, Monaco 2, Totemic, and Never Alone 2, is uncertain. It is also unclear whether the publisher will continue to exist once the third-party studio overseeing Humble Games' operations completes its work.
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