The stock of Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA) closed at $3.83 gaining 2.41% in yesterday’s trading session. This company has plans underway to shut down NaturalMotion’s Oxford office.
At this point in time it is still unclear how many persons might end up losing their jobs in the long run. The decision is a delicate balancing act on the part of Zynga since some employs get really emotional on learning that they have to be laid off. However, at the end of the day what matters is taking that decision that will help the company forge ahead.
There are about 50 persons working in the office and the company is considering moving all of them to London and Brighton.
In was back in June that Zynga announced its plan close down its commercial technology licensing business, a large part of which emanated from its Oxford base. NaturalMotion played its role in helping the third-party developers with technology including animation engine Euphoria and the character animation toolset Morpheme. The tools were found useful in games such as Until Dawn,Red Dead Redemption,Grand Theft Auto V and others.
Through an official statement, Zynga outlined that it was going to narrow down its focus into offering the required support to “forever franchises” and new IP.
The company’s spokesperson said that since last year they had dedicated efforts towards orienting their NaturalMotion team around strategic priorities and they were optimistic they would succeed in their quest to promote studio’s next phase of growth.
In an interview in one of the media houses, the official opined, “We’re constantly evaluating our business and exploring ways to concentrate our teams and better support our forever franchises and new IP. Much of the work done in our Oxford office currently supports products in development in our Brighton and London locations, so we see an opportunity to redeploy and increase our talent in those studios.”
According to him, relocating the company’s teams was a good thing since they would be able to further invest in new action strategy titles NaturalMotion and the CSR2, Dawn of Titans.
