Firaxis Games, the developer behind the Civilization series and many other games bearing co-founder Sid Meier's namesake, has reportedly laid off multiple employees in early September 2025. The scope of the layoffs at Firaxis Games is not clear, but it's the latest bit of news in an ongoing trend of mass internal restructuring that has many players and workers in the gaming business feeling nervous for the future.
Firaxis was founded in 1996 by Meier, Jeff Briggs, and Brian Reynolds, ahead of Hasbro's acquisition of MicroProse, another company that Meier co-founded. While the first two games in the Civilization series were developed and published under the MicroProse name, Firaxis has carried on their legacy with five more mainline titles and a few spin-offs, with Civilization 7 launching this past February. Over the course of the last three decades, the company has been behind a variety of other popular strategy and simulation games, including the XCOM series, Sid Meier's Pirates, and Marvel's Midnight Suns.
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Firaxis Games Is Laying Off Employees
But despite its dedicated fan base in a somewhat niche strategy games market, new reports state that an unspecified number of employees has been laid off from the publisher and developer. Former Firaxis writer Emma Kidwell broke the news on September 4 with a post on LinkedIn, identifying herself as one of the employees who had been laid off and seeking new employment opportunities. A spokesperson for 2K, Firaxis' parent company, responded to a press inquiry from RockPaperShotgun, and while company policy would not allow 2K to divulge how many employees have been let go, the official statement indicates that employees were released in a restructuring move at Firaxis that "optimizes its development process for adaptability, collaboration, and creativity." Several unofficial reports indicate the number of affected employees is in the dozens.
This is not the first time that 2K has made staffing cuts at one of its development studios in recent years. In both September 2023 and February 2024, WWE 2K series developer Visual Concepts was hit with layoffs ahead of the release of WWE 2K24, which ended up being one of the highest-rated games in franchise history. As with the recent layoffs at Firaxis, no official number of released employees was ever disclosed.
The layoffs and restructuring trend certainly isn't limited to just 2K, either, as many studios in recent years have been hit with reductions in staff, canceled projects, and even complete shuttering. Probably the most dramatic of these in recent memory began in May, when layoffs at Microsoft were reported to have resulted in a workforce reduction of up to four percent, costing about 9,000 people their jobs. That same move resulted in development ceasing for games like Everwild and the reboot of Perfect Dark.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 79 /100 Critics Rec: 77%
- Released
- February 11, 2025
- ESRB
- Everyone 10+ // Alcohol and Tobacco Reference, Mild Language, Mild Violence, Suggestive Themes
- Developer(s)
- Firaxis Games
- Publisher(s)
- 2K
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- Grand Strategy, Turn-Based Strategy, 4X
