Rock Band Developer, Harmonix, Cuts Back on Employees

As the gaming industry starts feeling the bitter taste of recession more and more, another studio has to cut back on its workforce. We already saw Electronic Arts fire over 1,500 people and shut down game developer Pandemic Studio, and now it seems like one of its smaller business partners needs to make a few cutbacks as far as human resources go as well. The developer responsible for the Rock Band franchise, Harmonix, laid off dozens of employees today. First reported by Joystiq, GameSpot managed to get an official confirmation from MTV Games and it seems like plenty of Rock Banders will have to start looking for other ways to pay their bills.

According to the official statement released, just shy of 40 people have left the company, and it seems like the QA department was hit the hardest. "We can confirm that 39 positions were eliminated today at Harmonix as part of re-structuring to better align our staffing to best suit our product development plans and schedules moving forward," the official representative said. "Those affected were primarily in QA. The others affected ranged from administrative to other various roles within the company."

The statement said that the company had to lay off around 13 percent of its staff, and that the decision was made in order to bring itself "in line with how other game developers manage their QA departments." At least in the near future, the company will mainly rely on part-time help, outsourced QA, temporary employees and assistance from external partners. "MTV Games and Harmonix are very pleased with the sales of our Rock Band titles and we expect to continue to see strong sales throughout the holidays across all of our titles," the representative added.

While the cutbacks are somewhat substantial considering the size of the company, the representative said that this did not reflect in any way on the sales of its product at the moment, nor that future projects would be affected. Still, we cannot link this to its recent announcement in which Harmonix revealed that future DLC for Rock Band: Unplugged would be halted.