Kerbal Space Program 2 developer says Intercept team will be laid off in June
Take-Two’s CEO recently denied reports that the studio had been closed
The Intercept Games team is reportedly being laid off next month.
That’s according to a new LinkedIn update from Quinn Duffy, who’s a senior design manager at the Kerbal Space Program 2 studio.
“The team at Intercept Games will be laid off as of June 28th so a great group will be out and about looking for their new roles. As will I,” he said.
The future of Intercept Games has been uncertain for some time amid ongoing restructuring at owner Take-Two Interactive.
Last month, Take-Two announced plans to lay off 5% of its workforce, or around 600 people, as part of cost-cutting measures that would also result in the cancellation of unnamed game projects.
This was followed by a Bloomberg report which claimed it had seen documentation revealing that two of the casualties of this restructuring were Seattle-based Intercept Games, and Roll7, the London-based developer behind OlliOlli and Rollerdrome.
Intercept and Roll7 are internal development studio of Take-Two publishing label Private Division.
GamesIndustry.biz also reported in early May that the “vast majority” of Private Division’s teams in Seattle, New York, Las Vegas and Munich had been laid off.
But in mid-May, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told IGN neither studio had been closed.
“We didn’t shutter those studios, to be clear,” he claimed. “And we are always looking at our release schedule across all of our studios to make sure that it makes sense.
“So we are being very judicious because we are in the middle of a cost reduction program that we’ve already concluded and are now fully rolling out. We’ve announced that we’re saving $165 million in existing and future costs, but we haven’t shuttered anything.”