Exclusive information obtained by Coreesports reveals that in March of this year, Kuaishou officially disbanded its Beijing gaming division. Only a few people were transferred to other project teams, such as Lin Yancheng, the head of the Beijing gaming division. The scale of this layoff is close to 30-40 people, mainly members of the “Code: North Three” card project team.
According to reports, the trigger for this round of layoffs was due to the failure of the test data for “Code: North Three.” The above situation also conforms to the standard practice of most game companies in cutting projects. That is, if a business unit has profitable projects, there will be one or two chances for trial and error; if a business unit does not have profitable projects, it will be restructured as a whole.
Since its establishment, the Beijing Gaming Division has successively launched “Journey to the West: Burning Soul” in July 23 years ago and tested “Code: North Three”. The former had a research and development time of over three years, costing several billion yuan, but failed to recover costs. It is reported that within two to three months after the project went online, more than 70 people from the Beijing Gaming Division’s mid-level team were laid off. Looking back further, there was a wave of layoffs at the beginning of 2023 when there were less than one hundred people in the Beijing Gaming Division.
With this wave of layoffs in March this year, it can be said that Kuaishou’s Beijing Gaming Division has been adjusting for these past two years. In the end, it faced an outcome where it was completely disbanded.
In October 2021, the Kuaishou Gaming Business Department announced its official upgrade to the Kuaishou Gaming Division. The business involves self-development and publishing, with a focus on card games, casual competitive games, action RPGs, shooting games, SLGs, simulation management games, next-generation large worlds and more. At the same time, Kuaishou Games also announced the opening of studios in six cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Guangzhou (in preparation), Chengdu (in preparation).
Kuaishou’s self-developed games have entered the fast lane. In just over two years, we have seen Kuaishou’s self-developed and agent-distributed products come out one after another. At the same time, Kuaishou’s game business structure has gradually become clearer.
Now, with the iteration of product testing, the business unit architecture is undergoing new changes again. With the overall disappearance of Beijing Business Unit in Kuaishou’s self-developed game business structure, now Kuaishou’s self-developed games have formed a pattern where the Yangtze River Delta Game Business Unit and Pearl River Delta Business Unit stand side by side.
The Kuaishou Games Beijing division has been in three places in the Xierqi area of Haidian District, namely Wanji Space, RT-HITECH, and Yuan Center. What’s cruel is that almost every time they move to a new place, there are fewer people until eventually approaching zero and being completely wiped out as a whole.
Many former Kuaishou game employees revealed that they were not surprised by the overall layoffs of the Beijing Gaming Division this time. First of all, when Kuaishou Games North Division was established, there was internal skepticism. There are two reasons: first, the product foundation is not strong. The development time for “Journey to the West: Burning Soul” exceeded three years and was originally represented by Tencent Games but later returned. After rushing to launch online with the original intention of recovering some costs, unfortunately things did not go as planned and it ended up losing money in the end. Second, there is a certain physical distance between the main R&D force and their base in the Yangtze River Delta region, leading to internal resource coordination mismatches.
Since there are no mature profitable projects, naturally there are fewer opportunities for trial and error. With the new test data not meeting expectations, it is not surprising that the team was cut. Coreesports have learned that this round of layoffs offers a generous severance package to employees, following an N+1 model where N represents the average income of the previous twelve months. On the day of notification of being laid off, employees can choose to leave two weeks later without having to come to work during that period.
In addition, employees can choose to extend their stay at the company for an extra month on top of the two weeks, and pay social security for an additional month. However, they do not need to come to the company during this period. Of course, there is no notice bonus for staying +1.
SEE ALSO: Kuaishou’s Language Model Surpasses GPT-3.5 in Breakthrough Announcement
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