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  • February 18, 2025
Bulletstorm and Painkiller developers People Can Fly let go of more than 120 people and suspended or scaled down projects

Bulletstorm and Painkiller developers People Can Fly let go of more than 120 people and suspended or scaled down projects

Bullet stormPainkiller and Outdoor riders developers People Can Fly are “suspending or parting ways” with more than 120 people, shelving one video game project, downsizing another and “restructuring some of our support teams” in light of the market turmoil.

“This action became necessary because the pressure from the external market remained greater than we expected,” writes CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski. Xitter. “The video game market is still evolving and we need to adapt to the current state of play. We are redoubling our efforts with new work for rentals and focusing on the development of a single independent game.”

Based in Warsaw, People Can Fly dates back to 2002 and found early success with FPS Painkiller. They worked extensively with Epic Games in the 1990s and became a subsidiary of the Gears studio in 2012. Since splitting from Epic in 2015, they have expanded significantly, setting up a satellite studio in Newcastle in 2017 and another Polish studio in Rzeszów in 2018. , and a fourth studio in New York in 2019. They became a publicly traded company in 2020, subsequently acquiring Phosphor Studios, Game Aan and Incuvo Studios. By 2023, People Can Fly had more than 600 employees, with seven projects on the books as of July.

But People Can Fly has not escaped the industry’s ongoing economic problems, which have led to thousands of problems dismissed This year, as business leaders “recalibrate” in the wake of a gaming boom brought on by pandemic lockdown conditions. They are in January this year laid off 30 developers who were working on an unannounced Square Enix game. They have in April announced the cancellation of a co-op action RPG codenamed Project Dagger, which would one day be published by GTA6 company Take-Two.

People Can Fly’s last release was Bulletstorm VR, an updated version with a magical headset of the shooter in which you launch mooks into cacti or swing them around with an energy belt. In theory, their next will be Project Gemini, expected sometime in 2026. Good luck to everyone who lost their job this week, just a few weeks before the seasonal holidays.