Georgia company behind Smite video game cuts jobs as industry struggles

About 75 employees remain with the company. More than 90% of those workers are based in Georgia, Chisam said.

Hi-Rez’s strategy moving forward is to focus on its “most valuable IP,” Chisam said. The layoffs come as Hi-Rez continues development work on the sequel to its popular title Smite, a multiplayer online battle arena game.

Additionally, the company has ceased producing major updates on Smite, Paladins, a first-person shooter game launched in 2018, and Rogue Company, a third-person shooter released in 2022.

Founded in 2005, Hi-Rez is the largest game developer based in Georgia. It has several subsidiaries, including Evil Mojo Games and Titan Forge Games.

Hi-Rez expanded significantly over the last 15 years. In 2014, the company announced it was investing $10 million into expanding its headquarters and adding about 30 jobs, bringing its total workforce to 100. Two years later, Hi-Rez announced yet another expansion and said it would create 75 jobs.

Industry shifts

Hi-Rez is one of dozens of game studios worldwide that have shed jobs over the past year.

The industry is contracting after a period of rapid growth that began as the COVID-19 pandemic fueled a surge in gaming. Studios met the demand by expanding their staff and developing new titles or versions of older favorites. Larger, publicly traded corporations also made costly investments in game studios, such as Microsoft’s $75.4 billion acquisition of Call of Duty-maker Activision Blizzard in 2023. But demand eventually waned.

Studios are now trying to save costs for several reasons. The cost of developing and marketing games has increased as expectations from consumers became higher. Securing funding to make those games was difficult as interest rates in the U.S. climbed to their highest points in decades. Consumers’ interests shifted. New titles weren’t resonating. Russia invaded Ukraine. China implemented, and then lifted, a freeze on approving video games.

Now, there is general uncertainty over the ways in which President Donald Trump’s 20% tariff on Chinese imports could impact the sale of video game consoles.

During the down cycle, investment dollars are not flowing into the industry to do bold projects at the pace they were years before. This means smaller studios like Hi-Rez need to ensure they are operating in ways that can be supported fully by their own cash flows, Chisam said.

Between 2023 and 2025, thousands of game professionals have lost their jobs. The exact number varies, but the estimated combined total for those years is about 25,000, according to a layoff tracker created by Farhan Noor, a technical artist at Riot Games.

In a survey of more than 3,000 game developers and industry professionals this year, 11% of developers reported being laid off and 29% observed their direct colleagues being laid off, according to a report from the organizers of the Game Developers Conference.

In the past year, Hi-Rez has had three rounds of layoffs. The previous round was in October and mostly affected teams focused on cosmetic and systems features on Smite, Chisam wrote on X at the time.

Hi-Rez is one of few game studios with a footprint in Georgia. This makes the job search more difficult for industry professionals pursuing another role who do not want to leave the state. But this is true of other cities with major games companies, too, because the industry isn’t necessarily centralized in one location.

Alexandra Lerman was impacted by this most recent round of layoffs. She spent about five years with Hi-Rez, beginning as a quality assurance analyst in 2020 before moving up to a game designer. Long before she was hired, however, she was a superfan of Smite, which gave her an advantage in her role.

During the first two years of her time with Hi-Rez, the industry felt like it was booming. It was her first job out of college, so she didn’t have much to compare it to, but it felt exciting and new, Lerman said.

But changes were inevitable. Over time, people returned to work and spent less time on gaming. It seemed like the player base of Hi-Rez’s titles were going down, she said. She said she felt like expectations were being pushed harder internally. Things started to get real in the round of layoffs preceding hers, Lerman said. It hit a lot of people in her department and impacted friends she made at the company long before she was hired.

Credit: Alexandra Lerman

Credit: Alexandra Lerman

The job search has been rough, she said. She has been searching for a new role for only a few weeks, having spent much of the time after her departure processing the situation.

“Some of my co-workers have been blessed to be getting really good opportunities,” Lerman said.

Open roles aren’t hard to come by. The problem is, however, trying to find one that allows her to stay in Atlanta. Lerman, who is from the Philadelphia area, likes Atlanta and would like to stay as long as she can. The industry is accepting of remote or hybrid roles, but they are more difficult to find as an associate or junior worker, she said. Many of her colleagues and friends in the industry have had to move out of state for new opportunities.

“It’s really not a solid bet to say ‘I’m definitely staying in Atlanta if I want to stay in the industry.’ It’s a much more confident bet to say ‘I’d like to stay in the industry’ and be willing to move to other places,” Lerman said.