14 DAY TRIAL // Trouble seems to be brewing at MetroGames, a developer of social games which is based in Argentina, with company executives reporting a number of problems with finances, although they insist that the games the company oversees, including the popular Facebook title Coco Girl, will continue to operate.
One of the designers working at the company, named Facundo Mounes, sent a tip to Gamasutra saying that half of the 80 employees who were working at MetroGames were laid off after a staff meeting about one week ago.
The employee claims that the developer is no longer able to actually pay those who work there and that Christmas bonuses were also withheld.
Julian Lisenberg, who is the Chief Operation Officer at MetroGames, told Gamasutra that, “We are facing serious financial problems, and have had to make several layoffs this week. Our games remain online, and our operations will continue as usual.”
MetroGames is being funded by Playdom, one of the social oriented divisions from Disney, although the well known entertainment company does not directly own it.
Recently Playdom has given MetroGames about 5 million dollars (3.86 million Euro) which makes the fact that the developer cannot pay its employees even more troubling.
Mounes says that the leadership of the company has been applying pressure on the employees to quit rather than be fired and says that Disney was supposed to initially buy the studio outright, which would have solved all its problems.
His claims were confirmed by another two sources inside the developer, who claimed that the company was trying to
The COO of the company has not commented on these accusations.
The social games market has been booming all through 2011 but in order to keep money and stay afloat companies need to have ever increasing numbers of players, which apparently Coco Girl failed to achieve.