Crystal Dynamics Announces Its Third Round of Layoffs Within Two Years

The post says that the decision “was not made lightly. It was necessary, however, to ensure the long-term health of our studio and core creative priorities in a continually shifting market.” The studio then thanked the employees it laid off, followed by stating a commitment to “offering the full extent of support and resources at our disposal during this transition.” The post ends with thanking their teams, players, and partners for their continued support before and a clarification that their upcoming Tomb Raider game is “unaffected.”

The latter is a bit of a hard pill to swallow considering that it’s hard for a final product not to be affected, in either progress and potential, by its studio losing people who may have been working on it. It’s also difficult to reconcile since layoffs have become a consistent pattern at Crystal Dynamics specifically, even amid an industry that has been plagued by mass layoffs and studio closures. Prior to yesterday’s news, Crystal Dynamics laid off 17 staff members in March 2025. Before that, the studio suffered layoffs in September 2023 following a major restructuring of its parent company Embracer Group in June 2023. This makes the newest round of layoffs the third within a span of two years. 

It’s not the kind of news players have been hoping to hear from the studio. Outside of the basic fact that layoffs are incredibly disruptive to people’s lives and leave workers in vulnerable positions, the team behind the critically-acclaimed Tomb Raider series has been working on a new single-player, multiplatform game in the series following a partnership with Amazon Games in 2022. Details on this game have been scarce, with the most recent news coming from an interview  IGN did with Amazon Games boss Christoph Hartmann. After talking about the high expectations that come with a new Tomb Raider game and a poorly-aged claim that Crystal Dynamics is “fine,” the exec said “there’s some really great ideas here. Obviously, we’re not going to share any with you even if we would love to, but things are going well, things are moving forward.” What’s next for Tomb Raider remains to be seen, but whatever it is will unfortunately be coming from a studio made smaller during its development.