Nintendo Mobile Partner DeNA Issues Dozens of Layoffs at Western Studios

In the midst of the hottest partnership to ever hit mobile gaming, DeNA Games has started issuing pink slips to dozens of staff members across its North American studios.

VentureBeat reports that Nintendo's mobile game development partner, DeNA Games, has issued a large number of layoffs at its Vancouver studios and dozens more at its San Francisco offices. DeNA is recently known for signing a major development deal where it will be creating smartphone and tablet games featuring Nintendo IPs. These layoffs are strange due to the anticipated high profit that DeNA is about to rake-in by the end of the year once its Nintendo's smartphone games go public. DeNA West CEO Shintaro Asako recently said last month that he intends to hit a 100 million users once Nintendo's mobile games go live. Dena's latest game, Final Fantasy: Record Keeper already hit the million-download milestone in just a couple weeks on the market.

“DeNA Group is continually evaluating its game development operations to ensure that it’s structured in the best possible way to deliver high-quality mobile games to consumers worldwide,” a DeNA representative said. “As a part of this process, we have decided to reshape the structure of our North American studio operations along with a reduction in workforce. We appreciate their contributions to DeNA and are grateful for the opportunity to have worked with them."

“The West will continue to be one of our core markets for our mobile gaming business, and this decision has no relation to our alliance with Nintendo or the popularity of Final Fantasy Record Keeper.”

We've heard it all before: major layoffs, "this won't affect our current major game or our upcoming titles," but we know they do. With a massive surge and expansion about to hit the company, this is the worst time to start laying off people and this appears to just be a chance for DeNA Games to maximize its upcoming profits and to start overworking its remaining offices to make up for the layoffs.

You gotta grab as many coins as you can when you're controlling Mario.