Signalis, Slay the Spire publisher lays off all staff, reportedly shuts down
Humble Games, an indie mi-size publisher behind many critically acclaimed games, has been shut down and all workers have been laid off, former staff confirmed Tuesday.
Former employees announced the layoffs via LinkedIn. Former business development manager Nicola Kwan said that 36 people were laid off and that the company was being shut down. A senior QA generalist, Emilee Kieffer, also noted that the entire team had been laid off. Associate director of brand marketing Brea Timmerman added that all employees were called into a meeting and told their “roles had been terminated.”
“The game industry is volatile, it’s been inundated by people who only want exponential growth at the expense of making great games with great teams,” Kieffer wrote on LinkedIn. “But I believe we have the power to create studios that benefit us as game developers and not people that only see us as money-printing machines.”
Neither Humble Games, nor its parent company Ziff Davis, have commented on the layoffs. They don’t seem to have impacted Humble Bundle, a digital storefront known for its discount bundles.
The publisher was still going up until the layoffs, releasing Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus, a myth-inspired platformer, this week. As of this writing, it was still working on Wizard of Legend 2, an isometric dungeon crawler with procedural generation, along with Never Alone 2and a bunch of other titles still listed on its website.
It was a partner of the Triple-I initiative, a collective of indie developers and publishers that held its first online presentation during this summer’s gaming showcase.
Humble Games has been attached to some of the best games of the last few years, including the horror game Signalis, the short but sweet Unpacking, and the punchy and highly replayable Slay the Spire (a sequel, Slay the Spire 2, is in development, but is set to be independently published). An underrated favorite of mine was also published by Humble: Void Bastards, a roguelike shooter with a
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