Netflix is reportedly closing its Boss Fight Entertainment game development studio, according to various LinkedIn posts by staffers. The streaming giant bought the company back in 2022 and it has been responsible for games like Squid Game: Unleashed and the interactive narrative Netflix Stories.
This is relatively surprising, as Squid Game: Unleashed was something of a hit. It launched alongside season two of the show and has amassed over ten million downloads on the Google Play Store alone, according to reporting by Mobilegamer. It recently received a major software update coinciding with season three of the show.
Boss Fight Entertainment has around 80 staffers. It’s unclear if they’ll be laid off or shuffled somewhere else within Netflix’s gaming division. Engadget has reached out to Netflix and will update this post when we hear back.
Several designers at the company have expressed regret that we won’t see what it had planned for the future. “It’s infuriating that the world will never see some of the stuff that was shuffled away behind the scenes,” wrote design director Damion Schubert on LinkedIn.
This is the second studio that Netflix has chased out the door in the past year. It shut down its AAA game studio Team Blue, which had attracted developers from Blizzard, Bungie and Sony Santa Monica. We never even got to find out what the team was working on.
