ArenaNet, the studio behind the popular online games Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, informed employees today that it is planning big layoffs, according to a person who is there. Although ArenaNet did not give out exact numbers, and they may not yet be finalised, rumours floating around the studio signal that a significant number of people will be let go.

Yesterday, at the exact moment Activision Blizzard chief executive officer Bobby Kotick hopped on a quarterly earnings call to inform shareholders that his company had just gone through a “record year,” employees across the publisher of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and more were being brought into conference rooms and informed that they were losing their jobs.

Publisher Activision Blizzard has begun its long-rumoured layoff process, informing employees this afternoon that it will be cutting staff. On an earnings call this morning, the company said that it would be eliminating 8% of its staff.

In 2018, Activision Blizzard had roughly 9,600 employees, meaning nearly 800 people are now out of work.

Staff at the game publisher Activision-Blizzard are preparing for big layoffs, waiting to see who will be one of potentially hundreds of employees who could lose their jobs on Tuesday.

After Telltale laid off roughly 90% of its staff on September 21, the studio said the remaining 25 employees would proceed with finishing work on Minecraft: Story Mode, an interactive show for Netflix. Today, a narrative designer who was one of those remaining employees stated on social media that she and other members of that “skeleton crew” have now been laid off as well.

Telltale Games employees were surprised when CEO Pete Hawley announced the closure of the company at a staff-wide meeting. One employee, a source told Kotaku, had been working until 3:00AM the night before with no inkling that the studio was about to let them and over 200 other employees go, leaving behind a skeleton crew of 25 to finish off work on a final project (Minecraft: Story Mode according to Variety).

Telltale Games, makers of The Walking Dead adventure games and several other episodic series, laid off many of its developers today and may be shutting down according to messages on social media, a report by The Verge, and a Kotaku source with knowledge of the matter.

Carbine Studios, the developer of the massively multiplayer online game WildStar, is shutting down, Kotaku has learned. Fifty people will lose their jobs in the process, according to a person briefed on the shutdown. The game will also come to a close.

Mafia III developer Hangar 13 laid off a significant number of staff today, in yet another example of the video game industry's brutal churn.

In 2013, Eve Online developer CCP Games introduced Eve: Valkyrie, one of the current crop of virtual reality hardware's flagship titles. Today the company announced it is halting VR development, closing, selling and streamlining studios, letting go of "around 100" employees in the process.

Activision Publishing laid off a number of employees across several companies this week, Kotaku has learned. The publisher let go of staff at Infinity Ward, Beenox and other internal studios as well as their corporate office, according to sources, despite saying yesterday that they had surpassed their revenue targets for 2016.

Gigantic has been looking gorgeous, but that hasn't translated into financial security for its developer Motiga. The company announced this morning a temporary round of redundancies, going as far to label them as "significant".

Video game development studio Red 5, best known as the company behind the online game Firefall, missed payroll last week and could not pay its staff on Christmas day, according to several people familiar with goings-on there.

Briefly: About half of the studio behind Driveclub are getting laid off, according to Eurogamer. Created by veteran developers Evolution Studios, the PS4 exclusive racing game suffered an extremely rocky launch last year, but a series of updates improved Driveclub significantly.

Yesterday, the game development studio Daybreak went through massive layoffs, culling a large number of jobs in order to stay "profitable." That's just business as usual in the video game industry, where it seems like there's a new round of layoffs every single week.

Today we've got another batch of stories from people who have been affected by the never-ending cycle of layoffs that hovers menacingly over the video game industry.

Around 320 employees at Nintendo of Europe will lose their jobs this week, the company confirmed to Kotaku today. That number includes around 130 full-time Nintendo of Europe employees -- as was reported in June -- and an additional 190 who worked for the company's Germany-based localisation department by way of a leasing agency.

Here are five more stories of people involved in the painful job cuts that happen in the games business all the time. Four from people who were fired. One from someone who did the firing. We urge you to read their accounts.

Confiscated emails. Sinking ships. The looming feeling that layoffs are coming, and there's nothing you can do to save yourself. Two weeks ago, we took an extensive look at why there are so many layoffs in the world of video game development. Since then, hundreds of developers have reached out to sympathise, and to share their own anecdotes and stories.