Callum Cooper-Brighting, CEO at Netspeak Games Ltd has taken to LinkedIn and the company's blogto share the news that the company plans to make approximately 25 roles at the studio redundant.
The studio's first game, Sunshine Days, attracted $12m investment in 2022 and made it through to soft launch attracting 1.5 million downloads. However, it appears that further work on the game upon its journey to full release will require some cut backs and reapprasing of roles and future plans including taking the game cross platform and adding a creator mode. Work on the game is set to continue however.
Tough descisions
Writing on the company's blog Cooper-Brighting said, "Today, we are faced with the tough decision of putting a number of our talented team at risk of redundancy, resulting in approximately 25 roles at Netspeak becoming redundant. The decision to engage in a redundancy process has not been easy, particularly given the effect this will have on our dedicated and hardworking team. However, it’s important for us to be able to adapt our structure to ensure we can efficiently navigate through the increasingly challenging landscape of the current gaming industry.
He then went on to underscore the difficulties of the past year with the changing landscape for investment and issues around privacy altering the company's plans. "Navigating mobile gaming's landscape, marked by evergreen top-grossing titles and evolving user acquisition and privacy issues, has always been a complex endeavour," he wrote. "But the last 12 months have been especially tough. We hit major milestones that in previous versions of the industry, would have easily triggered new investment. But the fact is that new IP is just a huge risk."
Missing investment
"When we realised that without extra financial support (needed to combat the rise in price of UA across all channels as well as to keep cash flowing for a game with a long payback period) and after considering all other possible options, we unfortunately concluded that we will likely have to scale down our operations."
Underscoring the company's intention to keep working on and developing Sunshine Days, Cooper-Brighting wrote, "Sunshine Days is our first and only love. It will continue. It will grow. But that doesn’t make this any easier. I’ll be shouting out the amazingly talented people in the next few weeks as we firm up the difficult decisions. I’d appreciate any shares & connections you can spare to boost the visibility.
"Our commitment to providing excellent support and engagement for our community remains unwavering. We will continue to build Sunshine Days, ensuring that the game grows stronger and continues to bring our unique combination of surprise & delight to our players."
During the changes the company has promised support for employees to "have the best opportunity to find incredible work elsewhere if we are not able to avoid making redundancies at the end of our consultation process" and will be running CV workshops, interview training & we’re leveraging our extensive network of investors & portfolio companies.
