The mobile game developer Halfbrick, the studio behind the popular Fruit Ninja, has made around thirty members of staff redundant.
That accounts for approximately half of the studio’s workforce, putting its current staff numbers at fewer than thirty people. The report comes from CNET, which heard the news from various sources.
Fruit Ninja has been downloaded over a billion times. It’s a free-to-play game with microtransactions, and since its release, in 2010, it’s done very well.
The same cannot be said for Halfbrick, which has struggled since 2015, when it laid off all of the design developers. It was part of an interior restructure which saw the studio shift focus to supporting existing games – including Jetpack Joyride.
The satellite office in Sydney closed in 2016, with an office in Spain and an office in Brisbane remaining.
Now the 30-man studio is focussing solely on running live operations for Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja.
Reportedly, more redundancies are on the way later on this week.
