The game studio building a new BioShock just had mass layoffs

The team working on the next BioShock game is losing a third of its staff. According to Bloomberg, Take-Two is laying off more than 80 people at Cloud Chamber, which has been working on a new BioShock title, and the game has been delayed from a planned launch in late 2026 or early 2027. The game has already had a rocky development, and the changes likely mean that the new title may still be years away. The last game in the series, BioShock Infinite, was released in 2013. To help get this new entry back on track, 2K Games, the division of Take-Two that oversees Cloud Chamber, has hired Rod Fergusson, formerly the head of the Diablo team at Blizzard and helped get BioShock Infinite over the finish line, to lead the Cloud Chamber team. “I’m deeply grateful for the work the studio has done so far, and I’m committed to building a BioShock game we’ll be proud of and that our players will love,” Fergusson wrote yesterday. In an internal memo announcing the Cloud Chamber layoffs, 2K Games president David Ismailer said that “while we’re excited about the foundational gameplay elements of the project, we’ve made the decision with studio leadership to rework certain aspects that are core to a BioShock game, and in doing so are reducing the size of the development team to focus on this work and give the game more time in development,” per a memo published by Variety. Take-Two didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge.