Microsoft-owned developer King, best known for the Candy Crush series, is reportedly replacing a number of employees with AI tools created internally.
In a report by MobileGamer.Biz, anonymous sources have shed some light on the layoffs made by Microsoft early this month. Initially, Bloomberg reported that King had initiated the process of making around 200 people redundant across its offices in Barcelona, Spain.
According to the new report, the cuts are affecting level design and user research staff, as well as around 50 people on the London-based Farm Heroes Saga team. Some of the game’s leadership has reportedly been “put on gardening leave ahead of their departure in September.”
Sources have said that some of the staff that’s reportedly at risk, including many level designers, user research staff, plus UX and narrative writers, have spent the last few years building and training AI tools. Now, those AI tools are “basically replacing the teams,” according to a source, with the copywriting team “completely removing people” due to said tools.
Another source said that centralized staff are also “being removed,” which includes research and QA employees, adding that “if a resource is centralized it is being cut or moved into the production teams.”
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‘Fewer people in meetings, fewer stakeholders for every project’
The report mentions that discussions between King leadership and both unions and staff are still ongoing, spanning across the London, Barcelona, Stockholm, and Berlin offices. At the moment, many employees are allegedly “in limbo” for the summer, unsure of whether their job will be cut or not. King reportedly told staff that it will present a new organizational chart in September after union negotiations.
In an internal memo, which was reviewed and shared in the MobileGamer.biz report, King reportedly told employees that it’s making several changes to get the business back to growth, with “unlocking many more AI tools” being one recent example, as well as “investing more in marketing” this year.
“We’re fortunate to have many talented individuals at King. But we also have a collective problem: the size and structure of the company often makes it difficult to get things done,” the memo reads. “So we plan to simplify the organization—fewer layers, fewer overlapping remits, fewer hours spent on alignment, fewer people in meetings, fewer stakeholders for every project.”
In 2024, King held a talk explaining how the studio uses AI internally. As journalist Brendan Sinclair recalls, the panel discussed how the company uses AI it take care of mundane tasks to free up staff to spend more time being creative, as reported by GamesBeat at the time.
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In late May, King announced that former Candy Crush boss Todd Green was set to replace president Tjodolf Sommestad. In the announcement, the company touted that the Candy Crush series has generated $20 billion in revenue and accrued over five billion downloads to date.
“The mobile games business is young, King has adapted and evolved many times to develop great games for a huge audience, and we are just getting started,” Green said.