Jurassic World Alive, Cookie Jam developer lays off 200 workers

polygon.com:

Jurassic World Alive and Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery publisher Jam City laid off 17% of staff at the company and its subsidiary Ludia on Thursday. Jam City, which created match-3 game Cookie Jam in 2014 and has locations across the U.S. and Canada, acquired Ludia, located in Montreal and known for creating both original and branded games, in 2021 and collectively have roughly 1,400 workers.

About 200 workers were laid off Thursday between Jam City and Ludia. Polygon spoke to 10 impacted Ludia workers and two current employees. Multiple former employees at Ludia told Polygon they were either on leave or vacation while laid off, finding out first from other coworkers and then noticing they’d lost access to associated accounts.

Ludia workers who were not laid off got notified about the layoff first via a large meeting, where employees were instructed not to tell others, according to a recording of the call obtained by Polygon. Later, human resources started pulling the impacted individuals into separate meetings. At least one worker told Polygon they started losing access to their various work accounts while they were still waiting for their scheduled meeting time. Other confused employees began questioning the layoffs in public Slack rooms.

The majority of workers said they were surprised by the layoffs, noting they’d been promised previously that it wouldn’t happen — that the Jam City acquisition would let Ludia do more of what it already does. “People are really upset,” one current employee told Polygon. “Ludia’s treated us very well over the years. They’ve done a lot to try to take care of us, but since the acquisition, that attitude seems to be changing. We’ve tried to have our voices heard, but we’ve, in general,