It has been announced that well-known game developer and publisher Garena is laying off a portion of its staff, cuts which have apparently accounted for up to 15% of the employees at their Shanghai office.
This is not the only bad news surrounding the company at the moment, as their parent company Sea Ltd recently reported a $1 billion loss which resulted in Booyah!, a business unit of Garena, also seeing cuts and the app being halted. During the pandemic many games companies felt a boom with Sea being one of them, with the company seeing its market value raise to more than $200 billion, but since then they have seen a significant loss and are now worth $27 billion, almost a tenth of their previous worth.
Although Garena are not the only ones that are said to be receiving cuts from Sea they did recently take another serious blow when India placed government bans on the game developer’s popular title Free Fire which is their usual main source of revenue. Not only are they being hit with these fresh new cuts but they are also facing the shelving of multiple games.
Not all bad news
Despite the recent series of bad news Free Fire is still a massive flagship title for the company and back in 2019 the game became the most downloaded mobile game globally and currently generates more than 41 million active players, Free Fire was also the most downloaded game in January, and with parent company Sea, Garena managed to make our recent top 50 game makers list.
