An Undisclosed Number of Layoffs Happened at Firaxis Games

Dreamhaven is not the only company having employment issues right now though, as Firaxis Games has apparently also laid off a portion of its staff. No specific number was given as to how many people lost their jobs, although a number of employees from writer Emma Kidwell, producer Maya H., to narrative designer and writer Ben Reeves, have all made posts on their BlueSky pages confirming their loss of business at the company. Several other employees have voiced their thoughts on their LinkedIn pages, but unfortunately most of them are not publicly viewable without a LinkedIn account.

Given the rather middling reception and playerbase of Civilization VII, it's very likely the failure of the game compared to its previous entries impacted 2K's decision to let some staff go. At this exact moment as of writing the article, Civilization VI has nearly six times the number of currently in-game players, and Civilization V has over twice the number of currently in-game players as Civilization VII despite being 9 and 15 years older than VII respectively.

While some of the lower numbers could be blamed on less people being able to play the game for technical reasons, Civilization VII also has the lowest percentage of positive reviews of any Civilization game on Steam (not including DLC packs) with only 49% of reviews being positive compared to 95% and 84% for Civilization V and Civilization VI respectively. Unfortunately, reception on game updates has similarly not been very kind to the game. With maybe employees being laid off at Firaxis, this leaves the already fairly grim future of Civlization VII in an uncertain, yet gloomy state.