Bossa Studios, the British developer of games such as "Surgeon Simulator," "I Am Bread," and "I Am Fish," has decided to lay off 19 people at the end of 2023. employees, or approximately one-third of Bossa's total workforce.

The layoffs took place at the end of 2023, primarily among QA and production staff, as well as employees outside the U.K. Henrique Olifiers, co-founder of Bossa Studios, told the site that the layoffs were "a perfect storm event" until the end of 2023 which is believed to include titles such as "Mortal Kombat 1," "Assassin's Creed Mirage," "Cities Skylines 2," "Alan Wake 2," and "Modern Warfare 3," but which appeared in August. Not to mention the continuing influence of "Baldur's Gate 3.

"This blue moon situation has forced us to make the difficult decision to reshape the studio to reflect the situation at the end of this year and to now focus all of our efforts on 'Lost Skies. This has meant that we have had to give up roughly one-third of our studio, a heartbreaking situation."

Announced in May 2023, Lost Skies is an open-world co-op survival game for one to six players, much like Worlds Adrift, the airship MMO project that Bossa closed in 2019. Bossa has yet to say whether the planned launch of Lost Skies around 2024 will be affected by the layoffs.

Bossa's layoffs cap off what was clearly an unfortunate year for employees in the gaming industry: while 2023 was arguably one of the best years in memory in terms of games released, a surprising number of layoffs took place at numerous studios, with Versus Evil , Free Radical Design, Campfire Cabal, Volition, and several other studios closed altogether. Ironically, Versus Evil's parent company, TinyBuild, acquired the Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread, and I Am Fish properties from Bossa for $3 million in 2022.Olifiers, Bossa's CEO, told 2023 told GamesIndustry that the acquisition "gives us the war chest to weather any kind of delay or major investment in this new game we're making."