7-studios posts

Last August, on the heels of poor sales of Wolfenstein, Activision made the decision to lay off a number of team members at its Raven Software dev studio. This week two separate reports claim the publisher has cut more team members from another studio and shut down a third one entirely.

Activision has admitted to Kotaku that a number of team members from 7 Studios have been let go "to better reflect Activision's upcoming slate of music-based games." Kotaku estimates 30 team members have been laid off from the studio which Activision just acquired earlier this year. Another Kotaku report states that their Shaba Studios offices have been closed completely, with another 30 team members out looking for work. If true this means Activision may have let go of as many as 100 total team members in the past couple of months.

We saw this coming a mile away. Following word last week that 18 month old game publisher Brash Entertainment had basically shut its doors, Variety is now reporting that two of the company's third party developers are suing Brash to get back money they say are owed by the publisher. One is 7 Studios, who worked on the close-to-release Six Flags Fun Park and also another game based on an upcoming animated movie 9.

The other studio suing Brash is Zootfly, perhaps best known for a game it would never make; a proof-of-concept idea for a Ghostbusters game that was famously shown on the Internet via a Youtube video but then got "Foxed" by Sony because of their own plans for a Ghostbusters title. Zootfly apparently worked on a game based on the TV show Prison Break for Brash but now says Brash owes them $748,000 for their work. Brash CEO Mitch Davis has not commented on the lawsuits.