Thunderful Announces Restructuring That Will Affect Around 20% Of Workforce

That’s a shame. I love Zoink’s past games in particular Lost In Random plus the Steamworld games.

Must admit, never heard of the umbrella company nor any of the Developers they own, which is quite the achievement! Either way, rubbish news for all those who are impacted, I hope they land on their feet. The software / games / tech industry is in a bad place right now.

It's also worth noting that Thunderful merged with Bergsala, the exclusive distributor for Nintendo stuff in Scandinavia (and the only place where Nintendo doesn't have distribute themselves, or through a subsidiary.)

Maybe buying a slew of relatively unknown studios in the span of just a few years wasn't a very good idea. Disappointing that Thunderful's turned out to be a mini-Embracer Group in a sense, especially because their acquisitions were largely spearheaded when they were led by Image and Form's CEO. I expected better

@Fiskern Interesting, any hot goss on why they don't distribute there?

Remember when the 3DS initially underperformed? And then Nintendo president Satoru Iwata slashed his own salary in half, rather than laying off 20% of workers?

Remember that?
Modern CEOs sure don't.
What's up with that?

@boatie It is a fun story, but I don't remember the details. Basically they made a partnership with Nintendo by pretending to be a big company, when they both were rather small, and maintained the relationship since. So Scandinavians got NES before the rest of Europe as a consequence.

@LadyCharlie Just a quick google search indicates that Thunderful has a $35 million market cap and Nintendo is about $63 BILLION... so comparing them financially is probably not reasonable.

@HolyGeez03 Of that 35 million, I'd like to know what percentage still goes to CEO Martin Walfisz in the face of these layoffs.

>Coatsink... Headup Games

Wow, I really just blind spotted them hard after they stopped focusing on consoles. I didn't even know they were part of the group now. Last I checked, Thunderful was just Image And Form and Zoink. Gonna be a pain to double check the Spreadsheet on that...

Still, I wonder what the over-investmate was now. My beloved Embracer over exteneded on Middle Earth and Crystal Dynamics. Wonder what's gotten this other collective of European AA developers.

If I had to guess, the move into more expensive 3D development with The Gunk can hardly have paid off for Image & Form. It’s not a full clunker, but it’s definitely their first misstep as a developer.

What is it with the Scandinavians and overexpansion in video games? Not very lagom.

Maybe they will release Zombie Vikings before the Switch successor is released. This game has been one of the most anticipated that has been announced, Zoink Games has confirmed its launch on Nintendo Switch, showing a doubles game in a short video shared on social networks and from there I do not understand why it has not yet been published

sell smoke

funny they all come up with some false reason when in reality it's simply "AI can do your job and the fat cat CEOs need a third mansion more than you need to eat."

@HolyGeez03 You just have compared them😉 @LadyCharlie makes a good point in that we have seen a year of record layoffs at video companies both large and small and very little said about the corporate greed that has both brought the companies to these points and failed to mitigate the impact on their staff. Take-Two cut large numbers of staff with broadly speaking the same total wage as their 2 most senior executives. The small companies have tended to be more opaque about their executive salaries but they have had a similar model of trying to benignly buy developers up and then sack a good proportion of their staff when times get harder.

Sad to see Thunderful following the footsteps of most companies in the medium. I'd really like to know the paycheck of the new CEO and the company's numbers, I suspect the usual, at least regarding the suits, The Gunk probably lost money, the new SteamWorld seems to be much more expensive than previous games and Build is most likely in the same position as Gunk.

@DarkCoolEdge The Gunk and Steamworld Build probably would have been given a massive chunk of money to be on GamePass. So I’m sure they’re both fine financially.

But GamePass is a double-edged sword, especially for exclusives like The Gunk, you get a huge chunk of money to make it but after that sales are next to nothing as everyone gets it for free. But you at least don’t make a loss.

This is nothing to do with the games or their cost and quality. This is exactly as has happened everywhere else, the suits at the top, the money men who care not for the craft, consumer or even the end product, looked at some stats of other games and said “we have to make those figures too, our current success is not enough”. So they over stretched and pushed too far on investments and growth, and now that has come back to bite them.

Except it won’t bite them, the worst they ever get is a golden handshake and they move to the next studio and do the same. It bites the people who actually make the games as they get laid off for someone else’s mistake. A really easily predictable mistake if you’re not a cartoon villain of a person with dollar signs for eyeballs.

@LadyCharlie Capitalism has realised they have gotten to the point where they don’t need to care. They’ve worked everything into their favour for so long they can do and say what they want. Did you see Ubisoft lately saying they think “people need to be comfortable not owning their games”? People were defending that. They’ve gotten to that point where they can provide and in readily worse and more expensive service, tell us they don’t care and they plan to make it worse and people are not only ok with that they defend it!
(And for anyone confused it’s bad because they want to create and control a single way for you to play their games so they can nickel and dime you like all the other streaming services are now. They want you to have as few rights as possible so they can do as they please.)

I really miss Iwata at times. I don’t know if we’ll ever get a CEO in gaming that cared about the core games so much again. All they care about now is increasingly large figures.

@Ogbert I really don't think they got a massive amount for those games. Those deals are for big games. Heck, they tried to get Baldur's Gate 3 for just $5M. And it is known that they don't pay indies as they used to.
Also, with nearly no sales, I doubt The Gunk could break even.

@DarkCoolEdge I've worked in games and games that have specifically gone on Game Pass, MS will often fund development for a smaller indie game like this (usually they are already in development, and MS offers a large sum to help finish it in exchange for it being on Game Pass for a set date). They have to make it a good deal for the developer because of how much it butchers after sales.

Also The Gunk is an exclusive, MS payed for it. It might not have made MS their money back, but Thunderful / Image & Form is covered. You don't give someone a game to hand out for free when you're not going to make it available anywhere else for people to buy, or at the very least severely restrict it. MS knows this and compensates accordingly.

BG3 is an infamous example of MS underestimating the popularity of a game. They would have offered a lot more had they known.

For those that are curious about the salary of the ceo.

So looking at their financial report from 2022 it seemed like the previous ceo had a salary of 1 365 800 sek (130 000$-) but also 25 400sek in other compensation and a rather big payment towards their eventual pension at 537 200 sek. Previous ceo still got some money in 2022 (3 different CEOs in 2 year!) 456 500 sek all in all with salary and pensions.

Cfo and the chief strategy and investment officer had similar salaries.

Board members had a compensation between 250 000 sek and 550 000 sek.

Now I could check what their current ceo has gotten in income last year but he is rather new on the job so I don’t think it is worth the effort before their financial report.

The salaries are rather high but not anything close like some other companies. Would be interesting comparing to the salaries of the employees. I do not know specifics for thunderful but median game designer earns 46 800sek a month in Sweden and median game developer earns 46 1000 sek a month (excluding pension, insurance and other similar costs for the company). If we assume salaries are median the salary of the CEO is around 3x that of one game designer (removing pension and adding what the old ceo had in salary for 2022). Of course not everyone is a designer and many people in the company will have lower salary, senior positions will have higher and some studios are based in other countries with both lower and higher salaries.

Thinking they have less than 500 and majority are in Sweden. In Sweden an employee cost the company around 40-45% more than the salary (insurances, pension and more). 100 million sek cost cutting would have to be more than 20% of the workforce using previous salaries. But it makes sense as they would also have to rent less space and so on.

They are probably doing this so it looks better on the balance sheets for investors and the board as stock dropped almost 80% in 2022 and 93% since the top. Speculation but sometimes cost savings are more to meet some quota for a loan.

One of the board members owned almost 18 000 000 shares in 2022 (one of the founders of bergsala). Stock was at one point over 90sek but is now 4,7~sek (don’t think a Split happened). Most of the rest of the board members owns a couple thousand with one other owning over 100 000 (from 2022 annual report).

So I wouldn’t blame the ceo or their salary the most in this case (unlike Activision blizzard, that’s truly disgusting!) but investors losing money and overinvesting will cause 100~ people’s jobs to be affected