Looks like it's Tencent's turn to start turning off the money faucet for Western studios, as Bloodhunt developer Sharkmob says layoffs are coming
Tencent-owned Swedish developer Sharkmob, which announced in October that the supernatural battle royale Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt will be taken offline in April 2026, says it will lay off an unspecified number of employees as part of "planned changes to its organizational structure." The studio said Exoborne, the "tactical open world extraction shooter" announced during The Game Awards 2023, remains in development.
In a statement to GamesIndustry, Sharkmob said the layoffs will allow it to "sharpen our focus and align our efforts on the continued development of Exoborne and position us for sustainable growth." Exoborne held its first playtest in January and showed some promise, but a release date hasn't yet been announced.
The layoffs at Sharkmob come less than two months after deep cuts at Funcom, also owned by Tencent, which included the outright closure of Metal: Hellsinger developer The Outsiders.
Outsiders founder David Goldfarb reacted to the news in a wordless post on X:
Tencent vice president Yong-yi Zhu told GamesIndustry in September that the company has "no plans at the moment to pull out" of its significant investment in Western studios, which recently expanded to include a new joint venture with Ubisoft called Vantage Studios. But he also warned that "you may see a reduction in investment in certain places," which he said "is just the realities of the industry and the dynamics of the industry."
Tencent isn't the only Chinese game company to take that view: NetEase has ended funding for a half-dozen studios based in the US and Canada over the past year, just a few years after making major investments to increase its footprint in the region. In a February report, Niko Partners director of research and insights Daniel Ahmad attributed the NetEase cuts largely to the success of games like Black Myth: Wukong, Genshin Impact, Naraka: Bladepoint, and Wuthering Waves, which demonstrated that developers based in China could achieve results comparable to Western outfits at a fraction of the cost.