Penny's Big Breakaway studio announces layoffs: 'Evening Star has been swept up in the same turbulence that has affected so many of our peers in the games industry'

The videogame industry continues to be wracked by instability and chaos: Evening Star, the developer of the 3D platformer Penny's Big Breakaway, has announced that "turbulence" in the business has forced it to lay off six employees.

"This was a post that I was hoping to not have to write, but Evening Star has been swept up in the same turbulence that has affected so many of our peers in the games industry for the last year and a half," CEO and executive producer Dave Padilla wrote on LinkedIn. 

"Despite our best efforts to secure another project to keep our team together, we are in the unfortunate situation of having to lay off some of the folks that have worked with us for the last few years on Penny's Big Breakaway."

"This isn't a choice we wanted to make, as they are all very talented and valued individuals," chief technology officer and game director Hunter Bridges wrote in his own post, saying the cuts were forced by "volatile market conditions in the games industry and operational realities of our business."

Evening Star was formed in 2018 by veterans of the Sonic Mania development team, and that heritage showed through in Penny's Big Breakaway. But it was more than just a lookalike 3D platformer: "Instead, Penny’s Big Breakaway is a deeply compelling, replayable experiment drawing equal inspiration from modern Sonic, 3D Mario and more than a bit of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater," we wrote in our 80% review, adding that the studio's debut game is "proof that Evening Star is more than just the Sonic Mania crew."

But while reviews were generally positive, Penny's Big Breakaway was not—at least on Steam—a breakout success. Despite a "very positive" user rating, its all-time peak concurrent player count was just 563. That's not the whole story, as Penny's Big Breakaway is also available on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch, but it's not exactly indicative of a big hit, even for a singleplayer game.

Six employees isn't a huge raw number, but it does represent a significant slice of the Evening Star team. The studio's LinkedIn page indicates it has 11-50 employees, while the company website lists 19 employees, including the six who were let go, although it says the people on the page are just "some of our team members."

The layoffs at Evening Star are the latest in a nearly two-year bloodbath of cuts that have rocked the game development industry: More than 16,000 developers lost their jobs through early 2024, and the situation has not gotten any better in the last six months. This week alone has seen layoffs at Microsoft, Midnight Society, and Lost Boys Interactive; last week, on September 4, Until Dawn remake developer Ballistic Moon announced that it had made "the tough decision to significantly scale down our team to secure the future of our studio," just one month before the game's long-awaited release on PC.