In an official statement to Kotaku this afternoon, a representative for GOG confirmed the layoffs but did not offer much more clarification. “Letting people go is never easy,” they said. “We have been rearranging certain teams since October 2018, effecting in closing around a dozen of positions last week. At the same time, since the process started we have welcomed nearly twice as many new team members, and currently hold 20 open positions.”
One person who was laid off from GOG last week offered a different perspective, saying that laid-off staff were told that this was a move made by a company in dire straits. That person estimated that the layoffs had hit 10% of GOG’s staff.
“We were told it’s a financial decision,” that person told me in an online message. “GOG’s revenue couldn’t keep up with growth, the fact that we’re dangerously close to being in the red has come up in the past few months, and the market’s move towards higher [developer] revenue shares has, or will, affect the bottom line as well. I mean, it’s just an odd situation, like things got really desperate really fast. I know that February was a really bad month, but January on the other hand was excellent. We were in the middle of a general restructuring, moving some teams around, not unprecedented. But layoffs that big have never happened before.”