ProbablyMonsters, the Bellevue, Wash.-based studio collective that raised a $200 million Series A funding round in 2021, has laid off an undisclosed number of employees.
“Today, we are making the difficult decision to right-size our company,” CEO Harold Ryan wrote in a Sept. 15 post on LinkedIn. “We are eliminating some central services roles while we continue to support hiring in critical areas.”
A ProbablyMonsters representative contacted by GeekWire declined to comment on the number employees affected by the layoffs.
Posts on LinkedIn and other platforms suggest that the layoffs impacted ProbablyMonsters’ live services team, which is responsible for handling content delivery for “games as a service” platforms.
Founded in 2016 by Ryan, the former CEO at Bungie, ProbablyMonsters bills itself as “building a family of sustainable game studios through a people-first culture.” It raised another $50 million last year following the Series A round.
ProbablyMonsters currently consists of two internal game developers, Battle Barge and Cauldron, after selling its internal studio Firewalk to Sony in April. Firewalk later revealed its debut project, a multiplayer first-person shooter called Concord, at Sony’s PlayStation Showcase on May 24
ProbablyMonsters subsequently halted development on Cauldron’s debut project in June, with Ryan saying on LinkedIn that the unnamed project’s “competitive landscape is too uncertain.” Battle Barge, headed by a lineup of talent from Runic Games, Gearbox, and Perfect World, has continued work on an unannounced project.
“We will continue to add resources to our development teams and focus on getting our games to market,” Ryan wrote on LinkedIn on Sept. 15. “Our affected employees are not only great people: they are talented employees. If you have openings, I highly recommend each and every one of them.”
