Bossa says ‘disruption’ in the game industry ‘is not a phase, it’s a fundamental transformation’ of how games will be made in the future as it lays off more employees

Bossa Games, the developer of Surgeon Simulator, I am Bread, and I am Fish, is laying off an undisclosed number of employees as it moves to “scale back” its development efforts in order to focus on the upcoming release of the open world co-op adventure Lost Skies.

Bossa co-founder and co-CEO Henrique Olifiers acknowledged the “significant amount of disruption” that’s wracked the videogame industry over the past few years in a message posted on LinkedIn. He doesn’t believe it’s a “phase” the business is going through, but rather “a fundamental transformation of the games industry, a reshape of how games are made and by what kinds of teams.”

“The industry of two years in the future will not look like the industry of two years ago,” Olifiers wrote, a prediction of ongoing seismic change that will apparently impact how Bossa develops games in the future.

“We’ve had to make the painful decision to scale back, focusing on the late-stage production of Lost Skies and its upcoming launch, ensuring the game is successfully released and evolved for its players for the foreseeable future,” Olifiers wrote in a message posted on LinkedIn. “Once Lost Skies is established and enjoying live operations, we’ll reshape into small teams working independently on novel game ideas brought to the players as early as possible.

“This means saying very difficult goodbyes to extremely talented and treasured colleagues, truly some of the best people in the games industry, who have been part of our journey for a long time. We wish we had found a way of navigating this turmoil without resorting to the decision of scaling back our teams, but unfortunately we’ve failed in this endeavor.”

There’s no indication of a connection in Olifiers’ message, but NetEase acquired a minority stake in Bossa in 2019 with an investment reportedly of up to $30 million. NetEase recently ended funding of the Worlds Untold and Jar of Sparks studios and laid off developers working on Marvel Rivals at its Seattle-based studio, and is reportedly looking to make even further cuts in the future.

1This is the second round of layoffs imposed by Bossa: At the end of 2023, the studio laid off roughly one-third of its employees in what Olifiers called “a perfect storm of events,” including a large number of big-budget games released near the end of that year, increased operating costs, and delayed funding for new games.

But the studio’s problems have clearly persisted, and now it seems to be banking big on Lost Skies, which was announced in 2023 as a sort of second run at Worlds Adrift, a physics-based multiplayer game first revealed in 2014. Work on that game ended in 2019 after two years of early access, as Bossa said it hadn’t “reached the level of popularity it needs to continue.” Olifiers didn’t speculate on what will happen if Lost Skies meets the same fate, but I imagine it won’t be good for Bossa.