Kluge Interactive’s CEO says the team has been cut in half since last year across multiple rounds of layoffs.
Game developers in and out of VR have been struggling through a general downturn in the gaming ecosystem. Just last week, Moss and Glassbreakers developer Polyarc Games laid off two-thirds of its staff and Rec Room announced its pending shutdown in June.
Now we know that Synth Riders developer Kluge Interactive quietly underwent a staff reduction as well.
In a post on Twitter/X, XR analyst SadlyItsBradley wrote the following message:
I’ve been told that Kluge Interactive, makers of Synth Riders, also had major layoffs recently. Primarily due to Meta stopping VR support entirely for Horizon Worlds. Which Kluge was funded to build games in.
David Heaney
Roughly three hours later, Kluge Interactive CEO Arturo Perez replied with a confirmation:
I can confirm that we had major rounds of layoffs in December and January. Synth Riders remains steady but not enough to support our full studio. We are currently a team of 50 from a peak of 100 last year (we also had a major round last December).
Perez responded to additional comments in the thread as well, but notably did not confirm or deny that Meta ending VR support for Horizon Worlds contributed to the layoffs.
Kluge announced a partnership with Meta to build games in Horizon Worlds on a blog post in November 2023. Since then, it has published two worlds: Chicken Tag and Slimoshi. It also released BeatBlocks, its first Roblox game, last year.
Kluge’s most recent standalone VR project is Final Fury, a fighting game inspired by classic fighting games from the ’90s and ’00s.
