Penny's Big Breakaway announces layoffs. 'Evening Star was swept up in the same turmoil that has affected many of our peers'

The videogame industry is still awash with chaos and instability. Evening Star, developer of 3D platformer Penny's Big Breakaway has announced that the "turbulence" within the industry has forced them to lay off six staff.

"This is a post I hoped to avoid writing, but Evening Star was caught up in the same turmoil that has affected many of our peers in games industry over the last year and half," CEO and executive producers Dave Padilla wrote in a LinkedIn post.

We are forced to lay off some people who have worked on Penny's Big Breakaway for the past few years despite our best efforts to find another project.

Hunter Bridges, chief technology officer and director of games, wrote in his post that the cuts were forced due to "volatile conditions in the gaming industry and operational realities in our business".

Evening Star, formed in 2018, was made up of veterans from the Sonic Mania team. This heritage is evident in Penny's Big Breakaway. It was more than a 3D platformer that looked like Sonic Mania: "Penny's Big Breakaway" is a compelling, replayable game that draws inspiration from 3D Mario, modern Sonic and more than a little bit of Tony Hawk Pro Skater, we wrote in our 80% rating, adding that Evening Star's debut title is "proof that Evening Star's team is more than the Sonic Mania crew."

Penny's Big Breakaway, despite positive reviews in general, was not a big success on Steam. Despite receiving a "very favorable" user rating, the game's peak concurrent player count is only 563. Penny's Big Breakaway, a single-player game, is also available for Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5.

Six employees may not seem like a lot, but they represent a large part of the Evening Star staff. The LinkedIn page of the studio indicates that it has 11-50 staff, while the website of the company lists 19 employees including the six laid off, but it also says that the people listed on the page are "some members of our team."

Evening Star's layoffs are part of a bloodbath that has ravaged the game development industry for nearly two years. More than 16,000 developers have lost their jobs, and it hasn't gotten better in the past six months. Microsoft, Midnight Society and Lost Boys Interactive have all announced layoffs this week. Last week, Ballistic Moon, the developer of the Until Dawn remake, announced that they had taken "the difficult decision to significantly scale back our team in order to secure the future" of their studio, just one month prior to the long-awaited PC release.