5th Planet Games lays off staff as it transitions to mobile games

Online game publisher 5th Planet Games has laid off a number of its employees as the company moves deeper into mobile games. That will be particularly hard during the holidays, and it shows that making games isn’t an easy business.

We heard about it first from an insider source, who said it was a sizable chunk of the 65 people that the company had in its employment earlier this year. Robert Winkler, chief executive of Rocklin, Calif.-based 5th Planet Games, confirmed in an email that the company has let go a “handful” of people in the past month as it pivots to mobile gaming. The company has had a couple of small cutbacks prior to the layoff that happened this week.