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GREE lays off 30% of its key San Francisco office

Times are hard

GREE lays off 30% of its key San Francisco office

Following heavy jobs losses over the past couple of years in Japan, and declining sales, 2015 has been the year in which GREE has cut back hard in North America.

Following the news that it had shut down its Vancouver office in May, comes the follow up that 30 percent of staff at its international HQ in San Francisco have been let go.

GREE didn't announce absolute figures but the San Francisco has numbered hundreds of staff.

Hard decision

GREE International's COO Andrew Sheppard commented:

"Today we made the difficult decision to reduce the workforce of our GREE International Inc. business by 30 percent.

"This was done to better align operations with our development goals and business strategy.

"Several teams in San Francisco were impacted — we are working closely with each and every person to ensure the smoothest transition possible. Offices in other locations were not affected."

Bad run

The San Francisco office was created when GREE acquired OpenFeint for $104 million in 2011, although earlier in 2015, it wrote off the remaining $75 million of goodwill.

Indeed, GREE's expansion plans have been notably unsuccessful.

It set up an ill-fated London studio that was shut down before it could ship a title, while the acquisition of Japanese developer Pokelabo resulted in a write-off of $78 million.


Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.