Oni Press lays off more senior staff

gamesradar.com:

Two days after canceling its San Diego Comic-Con 2022 booth, which has since been filled by the Japanese toy company Good Smile Company, indie publisher Oni Press has laid off four senior staff members. 

Sales manager Henry Barajas (opens in new tab), who joined Oni Press in August 2021, as well as senior editors Jasmine Amiri (opens in new tab) and Amanda Meadows (opens in new tab) – both of whom survived a round of layoffs in 2019 (more below) – have tweeted about being laid off.

Additionally, Newsarama has confirmed that senior vice president of sales and marketing, Alex Segura, has been laid off from the company after being hired in May 2021.

These layoffs come two weeks after Oni laid off publisher James Lucas Jones and vice president of creative and business development Charlie Chu (opens in new tab), as originally reported by The Beat. Oni Press has two senior figures remaining at the time of writing: senior vice president of games and operations, Steve Ellis, and associate publisher Michelle Nguyen. Its two planned panels for SDCC, which would have been moderated by Jones and Chu, are listed as canceled on the convention website.

This latest round of layoffs follows the company's acquisition by Polarity LTD, an entertainment media company, in 2019. At that time, Oni Press and fellow indie publisher Lion Forge merged to become Oni-Lion Forge Publishing Group, LLC, under the Polarity banner. 

During the 2019 acquisition/merger, Oni Press and Lion Forge laid off nine members of its collective staff, including several marginalized employees (opens in new tab) and prompting significant blowback. This news followed earlier layoffs by Lion Forge in 2018 during a company-wide restructuring.

Stay tuned for more on this