According to various LinkedIn posts, Eternal Strands developers Yellow Brick Games have begun laying off staff to an as yet undisclosed degree (thanks to Chris Kerr on Bluesky for the initial tip).

Co-founded in 2020 by original Dragon Age creative Mike Laidlaw, along with a number of former Ubisoft devs, Yellow Brick Games would go on to release and self-publish Eternal Strands in January of 2025. The action-adventure RPG was their first and thus far only game release, though it received a free DLC expansion in April of the same year. According to reports at the time of the game's announcement, the studio was made up of 68 people as of April 2024.

From posts on LinkedIn, it seems that laid off staff include: Senior Environment/Hard Surface Artist Derian McCrea, Graphics Engineer Adam Clapsaddle, Software Programmer Rebecca Bélanger, QA Lead Jessica Chapados Arseneault, and Senior Level Designer Julien Tonsuso. It is currently not known if the layoffs extend beyond these staff who have posted about their own job losses, nor if there was any specific reason for these staff being laid off. RPS have contacted Yellow Brick Games for comment.

Solidarity to all affected. This news comes following reports of layoffs hitting Ninja Theory and Supermassive Games just in the past couple days, which are themselves just the latest in a series of deep, often cruelly-timed job cuts that seem to punctuate the games industry every few weeks. Microsoft recently continued with plans to lay off some 3,200 workers with hundreds of redundancies across multiple studios, ultimately including Ninja Theory and nearly half the staff of Age of Empires overseers World’s Edge.

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