COMP NEWS – It’s been an amazing year for gamers, but a not so stellar year for game developers, who have been rocked by several large waves of layoffs at popular studios. But one company is looking to break the mold of 2023 by giving its employees a £2,500 cash reward as an end-of-the-year bonus.
It’s been a rough year for the games industry. An estimated 9,000 people have been laid off in the industry this year, affecting employees at companies like Embracer Group, Epic Games, Amazon Games, Ubisoft, Activision, Bungie, Frontier, Codemasters, BioWare, Paradox, and many more. We’ve also seen the shuttering of numerous studios, including Volition, Free Radical, and Shadow Gambit creators Mimimi Games. Layoffs have also affected companies adjacent to video games, like Hasbro, which laid of 1,100 people two weeks before Christmas.
Hence, it’s nice to have some positive industry news to write about for a change. Rather than joining the seemingly endless layoff brigade, Games Workshop has given its employees an end-of-year cash bonus of £2,500. That’ll buy a few prezzies.
As reported by Dicebreaker, Games Workshop shared the news of the bonus in a half-year trading update. In the update, Games Workshop reveals that the company’s core revenue over the last six months was “not less” than £235 million, with added licensing revenue of £12 million. This resulted in a core profit of £82 million, and a licensing profit of £11 million, which is “in line with expectations” outlined in the companies’ previous trading update from September.
The cash reward is part of the company’s profit-sharing scheme, which rewards its workers based on the company’s percentage of profits.
The £2,500 cash reward comes as part of Games Workshop’s long-running profit share scheme, which distributes a percentage of the profits among its workers. In this case, Games Workshop shared out £7.5 million among its employees this December, which is up from £4.5 million in the previous year.
To read more about employees who received salary raises (and those who didn’t) in 2023, click here.
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