Singularity 6, the studio behind beta cozy MMO Palia, is dealing with yet another round of layoffs this week, following a round back in April.
“Palia developer Singularity 6 is laying off 36 or so people (40% or so?) just over a month after laying off 49 people in April,” Polygon’s Nicole Carpenter reported on Twitter last night. “They had a smaller round of cuts in Sept. 2023, too. Two sources said a bunch of people left after the April layoffs, leaving the staff much smaller.”
One of those impacted this week is QA analyst Kenneth Polly, who posted on Linkedin, “It’s time again for me to reach out to my network for support as I’ve been affected by today’s layoffs at Singularity6.”
The April layoffs hit 35% of the team – somewhere in the range of 44 to 49 people, according to our count – and included the marketing director, community lead, engineering director, QA manager, UI art lead, and even an HR manager. That led us to assume the company had sliced around 50 people from its 100-person headcount. Now it’s lost at least 36 more, in addition to however many people left on their own in the last few weeks.
Even before the layoffs, Palia had been the subject of a weird self-inflicted disinformation scandal as S6 resisted labeling the very much beta product accurately on places future customers would see it, like the Steam page. In fact, Palia appears to be doing pretty well on Steam, with nearly 12K concurrent peak (in addition to the early adopters off Steam and on the Switch), but its updates in the last few months have been on the small side.
Our sympathies continue to remain with the staff affected.
