Spyro Remake, Crash 4 Staff Laid Off As Toys for Bob Shifts To Warzone
Toys for Bob, the developer behind the well-received Crash Bandicoot and Spyro remaster trilogies and the more recent Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, has been shifted to support studio duty for Call of Duty: Warzone. Not only could this delay or cancel any upcoming retro platformers or other projects it may have had in development, but it also reportedly coincided with layoffs and voluntary resignations from numerous Toys for Bob employees.
For a studio like Toys for Bob, becoming a support studio at Activision is sometimes a farewell to the team's creative freedom. Classic Spider-Man game developer Vicarious Visions is an Activision support studio, and Neversoft is as well. They're just a couple in a line that have been repurposed to make assets and perform other critical duties to help ensure massive franchises like Call of Duty remain well-oiled machines. Even though there are lead studios on the mainline Call of Duty games, there are hundreds of talented people working on Activision's flagship annualized franchise because of its profitability.
On Twitter, Toys for Bob confirmed that it will be joining Raven Software as a support studio for Call of Duty: Warzone. Despite the positive tone of the tweet, this led to major backlash from fans wanting to see another Crash Bandicoot or Spyro game after the critical success of Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time. Toys for Bob character designer Nicholas Kole reveals that employees have been laid off or quit, and some of them are expressing their frustrations and disappointment with Toys for Bob's latest shift in focus online. Despite Warzone being a wildly popular game, it's obviously a far cry from colorful retro platformers and other, less realism-focused genres.
It's unclear if Toys for Bob is just helping out to ensure Warzone meets its deadlines at a critical point in its lifespan or if this is a long-term assignment for the studio. If it's the former case, perhaps the developer can go back to other projects after things get back on track, although likely without much of the talent that made its recent games great. However, there's little precedence from any major publisher with many studios under its umbrella for this to be the case. Either way, it's a bold, likely scary decision for some employees that are leaving on their own accord, rejecting job security in the face of Toys for Bob potentially losing its identity over time. As for what this could mean for Activision, moving yet another studio to Call of Duty support could potentially signal problems with the franchise as much as it does growth.
With rumors that Call of Duty 2021 may be in trouble, it may be time that Activision finally takes a step back and does what Ubisoft did with the similarly annualized Assassin's Creed series by taking a year off. Warzone seems to have proven that it can sustain players counts and revenues for longer than a year, so the publisher could opt to let its lead studios release a mainline Call of Duty every other year for a change to ease some pressure for those and smaller studios like Toys for Bob. However, it's not hard to imagine that would be an unpopular move with Activision Blizzard shareholders, who have come to expect the publisher's annual windfalls.
Call of Duty: Warzone is available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Source: Nicholas Kole, Blake the Non-Binary Robot