A few weeks back, Daybreak’s Enad Global 7 announced that it was laying off a chunk of its subsidiary Toadman Interactive and closing down several of its offices.
“Like many other game companies, we have gone through a tough period over the last 12 months, and, unfortunately, that means that we are shutting down our offices in Stockholm, Visby, and Oslo, as well as having some redundancies in our Berlin studio,” Toadman wrote on Linkedin. “If you are hiring in the games space, please reach out to Araken dos Santos and we would love to make introductions to our talented staff.
As GameDeveloper.com noted at the time, the layoffs included “around 100 full-time and contract employees,” all as part of EG7’s cost-cutting measures, but the company had only 111 as of the start of this past summer, which leaves the studio, uh, with around a dozen people – not counting not-employee external contractors, we suppose. GD also characterized Toadman as a support company that’s worked on Helldivers 2, Dead Island 2, Killing Floor Calamity, and Warhammer: End times–Vermintide; in July, it also released EvilVEvil, which was a total dud.
But of course, the reason we’re picking up the story is that Toadman is also supposed to be the EG7 substudio that is now operating PlanetSide 2 after Daybreak sold off the IP (to an external investor) and chucked the game the Toadman. The PlanetSide 2 subreddit was already pretty disgruntled over that situation, and we don’t know how many people were ever working on PS2 and whether they are the only ones left standing here, but news that Toadman has been cut down at its knees – on top of rumors that it had already outsourced PS2’s actual development to yet another outside studio – isn’t exactly filling the PS2 community with confidence in the MMO’s future.
