Tomb Raider: Catalyst developer Crystal Dynamics says it “remains fully committed to the future development” of the Lara Croft franchise despite suffering its fourth redundancy round in the last 12 months.
“Today, Crystal Dynamics is reducing its workforce by 20 talented team members, split between some development personnel and some central operations roles,” the company announced on LinkedIn. “This is a difficult day for our studio, and we never make these decisions lightly, particularly after the restructuring we underwent last year.”
At the time of its acquisition by Embracer in 2022, Crystal Dynamics had 273 employees across its Austin, Bellevue, and San Mateo offices. Since then, studio employees have endured three separate layoff rounds in March, August, and November 2025, all of which came on top of 10 job cuts in 2023. Now, the studio is shrinking its team by another 20 people. It’s unclear how many employees remain.
“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,” the studio added. “While we always strive to transition our people into new roles whenever possible, we have unfortunately reached a point where these departures are necessary.
We are incredible grateful for the passion and hard work these individuals have poured into our games and our studio. We are providing them with severance and job placement assistance to help them land their next opportunity. If you have openings or know of positions for talented developers, please contact us, and we’ll connect them.”
Concluding its statement, Crystal Dynamics stressed that while it understood “news like this can cause concern amongst our community,” it “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.”
Crystal Dynamics previously laid off an unknown number of workers in August of last year following the cancellation of Perfect Dark by Xbox, which Crystal Dynamics had been supporting. It currently has two announced Tomb Raider games in development: Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, a remake of the original 1996 Tomb Raider, set for release later this year, and brand new Tomb Raider game, Tomb Raider: Catalyst, due out at some point next year. Alix Wilton Regan will now play Lara Croft in both games, replacing Camilla Luddington, who portrayed Lara Croft in the Survivor Trilogy.
Both Legacy of Atlantis and Catalyst are published by Amazon Game Studios, which itself has suffered a torrid time of late, with a number of cancelations, closures, and layoffs. The Prime Video Tomb Raider series, starring Game of Thrones actor Sophie Turner, is currently filming in surrey, England.
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
