Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics has announced its latest round of layoffs in a statement on the company's LinkedIn page. After cutting 30 members of its development team just months ago in November 2025, it's now cutting another 20 developers from the team as its current projects "move into new phases of development."
This is the fourth layoff for the studio within a calendar year, from March 2025 to March 2026. It cut 17 people in March 2025, followed by an undisclosed number of staff in August 2025, followed by the aforementioned November 2025 cuts, and now this. That's a minimum of 67 developers in the last 12 months.
Just like it did in previous layoff announcements, the studio included messages intended to be reassuring that its Tomb Raider projects, like the recently revealed Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis and Tomb Raider: Catalyst, the former being a reimagining of the original Tomb Raider game and the latter a new entry, are not impacted by these cuts.
"Today, Crystal Dynamics is reducing its workforce by 20 talented team members," the studio began in its statement, "split between some development personnel and some central operational roles. This is a difficult day for our studio, and we never make these decisions lightly, particularly after the restructuring we underwent last year."
"As our current projects move into new phases of development, we continuously take a hard look at our team structures to ensure they align with our long-term studio goals. While we always strive to transition our people into new roles whenever possible, we have unfortunately reached a point where these departures are necessary."
The statement then goes on to thank the impacted members for their work, and adds that they will be given severance and job placement assistance to help them land another position before adding a message for players.
"We know that news like this can cause concern amongst our community. Crystal Dynamics remains fully committed to the future development of our already announced Tomb Raider titles. Today, however, our priority is supporting our colleagues who are moving on."
It's all fine and well for Crystal Dynamics and other studios to add reassurances that they are "fully committed" to their projects in these layoff announcements. After several years of layoffs practically every week in the video game industry, players are unfortunately so used to seeing studios lose developers and still get games out the door that many probably don't doubt a studio's commitment at all when these cuts happen. Other developers certainly don't, as they know how it feels to be committed to a project even during turbulent times.
But previous statements from Crystal Dynamics, specifically when it commented in August 2025 that its Tomb Raider project was "unaffected" by the cuts, or in November 2025 when it said the cuts were to "optimize" development struggle much more to pass the sniff test. It's difficult to see how putting more work on less people would 'optimize' development. It makes no sense that developers who just lost their coworkers they worked alongside with for months, perhaps years in some cases, would be 'unaffected' by those cuts. We know layoffs are traumatizing for everyone involved, and to suggest otherwise on any level is a total farce.
No one is questioning commitment, but these cuts have certainly had an impact on the Tomb Raider games, because they've had an impact on the people making them. All we can do on the outside is hope that the remaining developers at Crystal Dynamics are able to deliver the best game they can, despite the cuts. Which, we should have an answer to later this year, as the first of the studio's new Tomb Raider games, Legacy of Atlantis, is slated to arrive in 2026.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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