Studio Developing New BioShock Conducts Mass Layoffs

The team working on the new BioShock game has faced losses — a third of the staff has been laid off. According to Bloomberg, the Cloud Chamber studio, owned by Take-Two, is laying off over 80 employees. The game's release has been postponed from late 2026 or early 2027. The development has already had a challenging start, so these changes are likely to delay the release of the new installment even further.

The last game in the series, BioShock Infinite, was released in 2013. To get the project back on track, 2K Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two, hired Rod Fergusson — the former head of the Diablo team at Blizzard, who helped complete BioShock Infinite — as the head of Cloud Chamber. Fergusson stated, "I am grateful to the team for their hard work and look forward to creating a BioShock game that we can be proud of and that players will love."

In an internal memo announcing the layoffs, 2K Games president David Ismailer explained, "We are excited about the core gameplay elements of the project, but together with the studio leadership, we decided to rework some key aspects of the game. As a result, the development team is being reduced to focus on critical tasks and give the game more time to be completed." Take-Two is currently not commenting on the situation for The Verge.