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Big Fish Games cuts staff, closing Vancouver studio
Seattle-based casual games provider Big Fish has gone through a round of layoffs, is closing its Vancover studio and has entered a 30-day consultation period about its operations in Cork, Ireland. GameIndustry International obtained a letter by CEO Paul Thelen to staff that outlined the changes, which detail 49 layoffs in its Seattle headquarters, with another 70 employees "realigned." Big Fish previously had 524 full-time Seattle employees, so the cut represents approximately nine percent of the studio. "I want to stress that our decisions are not based on our company-wide performance or that of the people working on those initiatives – both of which are strong – but because of where the market is growing, and quite frankly, where it is not," wrote Thelen in the letter to staff. "The most significant decision we are making today is that we are discontinuing our premium cloud delivery business. This service is not growing as fast as we had hoped it would and is not on a path to profitability." According to Thelen, this will be the company's eleventh straight year of "record revenue" and the company remains profitable. He says to continue this momentum the company must increase investment in profitable areas and cut its losses. Thelen writes, "The most significant decision we are making today is that we are discontinuing our premium cloud delivery business. This service is not growing as fast as we had hoped it would and is not on a path to profitability. This decision reflects the reality that the costs to support streaming cloud delivery of premium games are too high, and the user adoption too low, for us to warrant continued investment." The company will continue to invest in its casual and casino free-to-play businesses, and focus investment on its "four largest languages": English, French, German and Japanese.
Big Fish Unlimited lets gamers resume play on mobile, PC and TV, stay distracted at all times (update: HTML5 explained)
The perpetual crisis of casual gaming is that need for just one... more... turn. After all, those 29 levels of progress aren't coming with you to the office, are they? Big Fish Games wants to ease our consciences (or at least our egos) with Big Fish Unlimited. By using HTML5 to constantly save progress, the cloud service remembers exactly where a player was and ports it to the next device: it's possible to hop from a Android tablet, to a Roku box, to a Windows PC's browser without having to replay anything. The nature of the streaming games themselves won't give OnLive players second thoughts, but their lighter footprint won't demand as much from an internet connection, either. Most of the intended audience will appreciate the price -- the now active service costs $8 a month for access to more than 100 games from the full catalog, and free play is on tap for 20 of the games as long as you can endure periodic ads. Whether or not coworkers can endure another round of your hidden object games is another matter. Update: We've since talked to the company directly, and it turns out that the HTML5 is more for the cross-platform support; it's the server that tracks progress whenever you quit a given app.
