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Surgeon Simulator maker Bossa makes round of redundancies

Surgeon Simulator maker Bossa makes round of redundancies

London-based games developer Bossa Studios is cutting some staff due to internal issues.

As reported by Eurogamer, 13 positions were initially on the chopping block, but this now stands at 10 jobs. In total, the firm employs 85 people.

Bossa's co-founder Henrique Olifiers has said that these redundancies are due to the new direction the company is taking and has refuted reports that they are to do with the commercial performance of Surgeon Simulator 2. The game was released as an Epic Games Store exclusive in August and failed to capture the same level of excitement as the 2013 original did on Steam. This could be, in part, due to changes in the games market.

"The other thing about fundamental change is that not everyone agrees with it, and that's alright, the world would be a much more dull place if we all agreed on everything," Bossa said in a statement.

"A small number of people are unhappy with these changes, and as unfortunate as that is, there's little we can do other than be candid about our motives and support them as much as possible. They have the right to feel the way they do about these decisions if so they chose to, and criticise us for it. That's just the way things work."

Developers at Bossa crunched for two to three months leading up to Surgeon Simulator's launch, with Olifiers saying that the QA team was hit pretty hard by this. The studio co-founder said that staff were paid overtime or given time off in lieu, but accepted that Bossa should have been more careful with development. Part of this issue was staff working remotely due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

"A lot of our culture hinges on the fact we all work at the same place," Olifiers said.

"We used to walk around, talk to each other, we know what's going on. Since we went remote, that all became far more complicated. But it's not policy. We don't like crunch. We don't like long hours. We don't ask people to do it. But it can happen up to launch.

"We don't always get it right. The thing is, we try a lot to get everything we can right. I don't want people to be compromising their work and life and their personal life. So we do as much as we can for people to understand that and to preserve that."


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.