After an initial wave of layoffs targeting the lowest salary grades, Gamestop now moves on to lay off engineers and programmers in the crypto sector as well.
Thus the company continues its work of thinning out to optimize the cost-productivity ratio set by the company.
Not only is it striking among the layoffs that there are many programmers, but it is noteworthy that engineers and senior programmers are also being laid off, even some involved in efforts aimed at the crypto market, since GameStop had recently announced that it was working on a wallet.
The bulk of the defections affect the very team of programmers behind the company’s cryptocurrency wallet according to Axios reports.
GameStop’s chief software engineer Daniel Williams spoke on LinkedIn, commenting:
“Today there is another big round of layoffs “Today there is another big round of layoffs at GameStop currently underway” in GameStop currently underway.”
Affected staff included e-commerce engineers and added that the company would be announcing this later in the afternoon (as has since happened).
The entertainment company has launched a marketplace regarding NFTs centered on the Ethereum ecosystem specifically on the Immutable X sidechain while this summer, it had announced its own Wallet also on Ethereum and quite similar in operation to the emblazoned MetaMask.
Ethan Gach, senior reporter at Kotaku intervened confirming the rumors in the evening telling that it was actually Matt Furlong, CEO of GameStop, who confirmed the layoffs to his own workforce using an email.
“We have continued to provide clarity regarding the right level of corporate staffing needed to achieve our profitability and growth goals.”
The next deadline to be able to prove that the “cure” through layoffs is working will be tomorrow, Wednesday, December 7 when GameStop’s quarterly earnings report is due.
Gamestop in the crypto world
The cutting of the team that had worked on NFT’s crypto marketplace is rooted precisely in the little space carved out by the tool in the market that is still dominated by other players.
The analytics firm DappRadar a month and a half ago had reported that GameStop’s platform was reporting revenues of only $29 million since its launch that is, since July of this year.
OpenSea, the market leader in NFTs and the largest marketplace for Ethereum NFT trading boasts as much as $6 million per day, meaning that OpenSea’s weekly turnover vastly outperforms GameStop’s total product result.
DappRadar has even stopped recording the flows of GameStop’s NFT activity on the grounds that it is irrelevant in the crypto market.
All of the above underlies the reasons for the company’s recent layoffs The effects of which can be felt as early as tomorrow with the release of Q4 data.
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2022/12/06/gamestop-fires-including-crypto-engineers/