Avalanche Studios, the developer behind Just Cause, have announced they are to lay off 20 employees.

The Swedish based studio, who is currently working on three separate projects including Just Cause 2, had previously announced 77 redundancies in October last year. Whilst this may come as alarming news to fans of the Just Cause series, Eidos remain adamant that the announcements won't affect development progress on any of the studios upcoming titles.

"It is a difficult business climate, but this is not nearly on the scale of the redundancies last year," stated Christofer Sundberg, CEO of Avalanche Studios. "As any other company we need to manage risks and sometimes that unfortunately means that we have to give notice and lay off staff. It's not more complicated than that."

Only recently, analyst Wanda Meloni estimated that over 8,000 video game jobs had been lost since July 2008, a trend which looks set to continue as the economic gloom worsens.

Posted: May 21, 2009 7:29 am