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Job losses at H1Z1 maker Daybreak Game Company

Job losses at H1Z1 maker Daybreak Game Company

In news that will come as little surprise, the company behind battle royale title H1Z1 Daybreak Game Company is making layoffs.

The studio confirmed the news to PCGamer, saying that the cuts to its workforce were to "better position" the company moving forwards.

It's not clear how many members of staff have lost their job just yet, but it does appear that chief publishing officer Laura Naciaux Sturr is no longer with the company, announcing her departure on Twitter.

"Daybreak confirms we are realigning our workforce to better position our company for the future. Because of this, we have had to make an extremely difficult decision to part ways with some of our employees across various disciplines at the studio. We are doing everything we can to take care of each affected individual by providing them appropriate transition assistance," a rep from the studio said.

"Daybreak remains focused on publishing and developing large-scale online games and will continue to service our existing and long-standing games and franchises."

This news comes less than two months after the 1.0 launch of battle royale title H1Z1. That game went free-to-play a week after it came out, which isn't a great sign as to its performance. Steam Charts data points to the game having just 7,826 players on average for the last 30 days.

H1Z1 was first announced back in 2015, with Daybreak working on a survival mode for the game as well as a battle royale mode. This was made with Brendan 'Playerunknown' Greene as a consultant, and was one of the first battle royale games to hit the market. All looked like it was going well for the project until Greene's own Playerunknown's Battlegrounds came out, dominating the market and killing much of the competition... except Epic's free-to-play Fortnite.

Still, on launch, Daybreak was bullish about the game's prospects. We wonder how they are feeling now. 

Best of luck to all affected by these lay-offs. 


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.