Don't worry guys, you're safe

Sega will offer 300 of its global staff voluntary retirement in an effort to drive profits and restructure the company around smartphone and online PC games.

Although Sega of America's release schedule will be unaffected, it will lose around 120 staff between 9th February and the end of March. Its offices will also be relocated from San Francisco to Southern California. The ongoing Sonic Boom TV show will also be unaffected.

Here's how the news was broken by Sega itself:

Voluntary retirement will be solicited in the aforementioned businesses to be withdrawn or consolidated and downsized, while at the same time personnel will be repositioned in Digital Games and growth areas of Group mainly as development personnel, in order to establish a structure which can constantly generate profits. The purpose of these measures is to improve the business efficiency of the Group.

Voluntary retirement is typically used by companies that are planning or predicting redundancies. Offering early retirement reduces the number of staff impacted by lay-offs.

Sega is the video game arm of Sega Sammy Holdings, and had just 100 million yen (around £500,000) in the bank at end of 2014. However, it still expects to make a small profit at the conclusion of this financial year.

Sega's recent console releases include Alien: Isolation and Sonic Boom, while its PC games - like the Total War and Football Manager franchises - continue to attract a sizeable audience. Sega has recently expanded into smartphone development with a vengeance, releasing mobile adaptations of its Sonic, Crazy Taxi and Super Monkey Ball properties.

Sega Enterprises - a previous iteration of the company - gained global fame for its arcade titles and its line of consoles, which included the Master System, Mega Drive, Saturn, Game Gear and Dreamcast. In the '90s Sega challenged Nintendo in the domestic console arena, but by the end of the decade it was forced to abandon the home hardware market and since then has moved into third-party publishing.

[source eurogamer.net]