Voodoo acquires BeReal and immediately makes layoffs

Nearly a full month after it was bought by Voodoo, BeReal has cut 28 positions.

As spotted by GamesIndustry, the social platform made cuts across its engineering, QA, and marketing divisions. Per COO Roman Salzman, the layoffs were "mostly part of a refocus on France/Europe-based talents."

"Not going to bore with details, keeping it simple here: these folks scaled a social platform from 200,000 to 25 million daily active users in 18 months," he wrote. "They all had to build it from the ground up and under tremendous pressure, and did it."

Voodoo acquired BeReal in mid-June for €500 million (or $536.9 million), and with the express purpose of expanding into the hypercasual market. In turn, BeReal would use Voodoo to have a sustainable growth path previously unavailable.

PocketGamer noted BeReal's headcount earlier this year was 60 employees, and was told by a Voodoo spokesperson those 28 were let go so the company could grow "in a sustainable way."

"We made the difficult decision to let some team members go," they said. "We are committed to maintaining BeReal's mission and values and to continue to build a place where our users can connect with people they are closest to."

Mergers and layoffs in the game industry

Layoffs aren't uncommon in the wake of mergers, as we've seen with Xbox twice this year. But typically, those cuts come some months after an acquisition has been completed, not a handful of weeks later.

Voodoo affirmed it'll support those being let go from BeReal, while Salzman listed all 28 employees in his LinkedIn post, offering himself as a reference for those who need it.