Microsoft is not the only company to lay off employees despite reporting record profits in its latest quarterly report. While the case of the Americans is quite blatant in terms of the scale of their cuts (9,000 redundancies in the latest round, more than 15,300 in the last 18 months), other European companies think they can still optimise their results for the next report to investors, and the victim in that balance sheet is Secret 6 Madrid studio.
In case you don't know it, Secret 6 is an outsourced art studio specialising in AAA video game development that has been in business for 8 years. It has collaborated in the development of titles as relevant as MediEvil Remake, Dustborn, The Last of Us: Part II Remastered, Diablo IV, and Lords of the Fallen, to name a few. Looking at this line of work, it's hard to argue that the studio is struggling, but its owner company Testronic, which acquired Secret 6 in its entirety in 2022, both the studio in Madrid (Spain) and the one in Manila (Philippines), has claimed "irreversible financial losses". The curious thing is that, from the moment it was acquired, Secret 6's Madrid headquarters did not receive a single contract or project from Testronic, maintaining its activity and solvency with the previous contracts, which are still in force.
Under the cover of these alleged financial losses, the parent company has opened an ERE (a legal process of massive collective dismissal) with which it is going to throw the 42 workers of the studio into the street and close it definitively on July 31.
But something doesn't add up. As reported by the Coordinadora Sindical del Videojuego, a trade union for developers and workers in the video game industry in Spain and with the support of CGT, they suspect that the intention from the beginning with the purchase of Secret 6 could be to empty the Madrid headquarters of work activity in order to relocate production and keep only the Manila subsidiary, where working conditions are much more precarious and wages are much lower.
Staff still active at Secret 6 Madrid have contacted Gamereactor to report on the situation and regret that such a corporate decision would once again take away a talented team "ready to continue growing" in the current climate of game development. The only thing left to do now is to defend the redundancy packages, which are also not the right ones due to the incorrect reasoning behind the closure of the studio.
We'll keep an eye out for any further developments on this news.
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