Piranha Games Cuts 38 Jobs Following MechWarrior 5: Clans Sales Disappointment

By the time most players had finished MechWarrior 5: Clans' campaign, more than a third of the Vancouver studio that built it was already gone.

Enad Global 7 confirmed on January 10, 2025 that 38 positions at Piranha Games had been cut across writing, FX/VFX, environment and technical art, level design, and software engineering. With a total headcount of roughly 106 people, that single round of redundancies eliminated approximately 36 percent of the studio. One former employee described the action as an "economic restructuring."

EG7 CEO Ji Ham stated that MechWarrior 5: Clans "has not achieved the necessary sales targets, which has forced us to take the necessary measures," and expanded elsewhere that the game had "failed to reach new audiences and expand its core audience as expected." For a franchise sequel that priced itself at $49.99 and launched October 17, 2024 across PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5, that failure to break out of its existing base had direct and immediate consequences.

The commercial shortfall stings harder when set against what Piranha had previously built. MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, released in 2019, sold over 2 million units and earned an 84 percent "Very Positive" rating on Steam. Clans, by comparison, landed a 76/100 on OpenCritic from 31 critics and a "Strong" designation, but only 63 percent of those reviewers actively recommended it. Reported technical issues at launch, including texture pop, frame drops, and stuttering, likely blunted word-of-mouth at exactly the moment the game needed to pull in players beyond the existing BattleTech community.

What makes the commercial outcome harder to dismiss is that EG7 saw it coming. The company's Q3 2024 interim report, covering July through September of that year, already revised the Adjusted EBITDA margin expectation for Q4 2024 down to 20 percent, citing Clans' delayed release and reduced commercial projections. The internal numbers were being walked back before the game had sold a single copy. The restructuring that followed was projected to generate annual savings of approximately SEK 25.8 million, roughly USD $2.3 to $2.4 million, with the process expected to be finalized by Q2 2025.

Piranha was not the only EG7 studio to absorb the blow that day. The same January 10 announcement included the complete wind-down of Toadman Interactive, EG7's Stockholm-based studio, displacing 69 employees and subcontractors. Combined, the two actions put more than 100 people out of work in a single press release, making it one of the larger single-day studio reductions in an industry year that was already trending toward catastrophic. Within the same week, Splash Damage announced layoffs of its own, and Jar of Sparks, the studio founded by Jerry Hook after he left as design head of Halo Infinite, halted work on its unreleased project entirely. Three studios effectively went dark in the first two weeks of January 2025.

For the MechWarrior faithful, the layoffs cut deepest in the disciplines that keep a game alive after launch: level design, writing, and technical art. EG7 committed to releasing planned DLC regardless, and Ghost Bear: Flash Storm shipped on May 7, 2025, drawing an 87 percent positive rating from over 400 Steam reviews. EG7's Year-End Report 2025 credited the expansion with lifting base game sales. That is a real data point. But Piranha's own narrative director, Chris Lowrey, had stated before launch that the scope of future DLC would be determined by Clans' sales performance. With 38 fewer people across precisely the teams that would execute that scope, what comes next for the franchise is no longer just a creative question.