Both Roll7 and Intercept Games were part of the Private Division.
This is a problem for sure. According to documentation that was seen by Bloomberg, the mega-publisher Take-Two Interactive has decided to close the Rollerdrome studio Roll7 as well as the Kerbal Space Program 2 team Intercept Games due to restructuring.
Roll7 was established in 2008 by Tom Hegarty and Simon Bennett, who have been friends for their entire lives. Roll7 is headquartered in London. OlliOlli, OlliOlli World, and Rollerdrome are all fantastic games that feature wheel-based mechanics, and Roll7 is the studio that is responsible for all of them. In 2014, OlliOlli became a hit on the Vita, and in early 2022, World was released. Both of these games are fantastic, but World in particular is a skateboarding platformer that induces a flow state and has an adorable art style. Rollerdrome was one of our favorite games of 2022; it is a luscious third-person rollerskating and gunplay game that looks like a slice of dystopian science fiction from the 1970s.
Roll7 has been honored with a number of prestigious awards over the course of its existence, including recent victories at the BAFTA and DICE awards. As the name of the studio suggests, the developers at Roll7 are experts in the art of creating action games that are incredibly fluid.
Roll7 was acquired by Take-Two in November 2021, and the company consequently made it a subsidiary of Private Division, which is the label that the company uses for small and medium-sized publishing deals. It has been reported by Bloomberg that Take-Two intends to pull the plug on Roll7 and will provide severance packages to employees.
Kerbal Space Program 2 is a well-known flight simulation game that is still technically in early access on Steam. Intercept Games, which has its headquarters in Seattle, is the person responsible for developing the game. Intercept was established by Take-Two in the year 2020 with the sole purpose of managing Kerbal Space Program 2, and the game has been receiving improvements ever since it was released to the public in February of 2023.
Take-Two has not yet confirmed that it will be closing Intercept Games, but it has also not asserted that it will not be closing the company. On Monday, the company submitted a notice in Washington delineating their intentions to terminate the employment of seventy individuals in the state and to permanently close their place of business. Additionally, a number of Kerbal developers have confirmed that they have recently left their positions. Take-Two has announced in a statement that Private Division will continue to provide updates for the game Kerbal Space Program 2.
Take-Two is one of the most successful video game companies in the world, with a revenue of $5.3 billion just reported for the previous year. It is the parent company of Rockstar Games, 2K, Private Division, Zynga, and Gearbox Software, and it is also the owner of Grand Theft Auto. Gearbox Software was just recently acquired by the company. The Borderlands studio Gearbox was acquired by Take-Two in March for a total price of $460 million. Gran Theft Auto VI, which is widely considered to be the most anticipated video game of the decade, is expected to add billions of dollars to Take-Two’s bottom line in the year 2025.
As of the end of the year 2024, Take-Two has announced that it intends to lay off approximately 600 employees, which is equivalent to five percent of its workforce. Additionally, it canceled a few projects that were still in the development stage. Take-Two did not specify which studios would be affected by the planned firings when the news broke at the beginning of the month; however, we now know that Roll7 and Intercept are among the studios that will be affected. In 2023, the company also terminated the employment of a few employees from the Private Division.
A total of 10,500 workers were terminated from their positions in the video game industry in 2023, and it is estimated that 9,400 people have been laid off in the industry so far in 2024. Over the course of this year alone, Sony, Microsoft, and Riot Games have terminated a total of 3,300 employees. Furthermore, the fallout from the funding implosion that occurred at Embracer Group continues to spread, with numerous studios closing their doors and more than 1,400 workers being displaced.