Vertigo Games is closing its Amsterdam studio, the company announced this week. The decision ends the operation of a studio that traces its roots back to 2015, when it was founded as Force Field Entertainment before joining Vertigo Games in 2021.
According to Engadget, company CEO Richard Stitselaar posted the announcement on X, saying that the "VR market remains a challenging space" and that the closure came "after careful consideration." Vertigo Games is part of the Embracer Group, a Swedish gaming conglomerate that has gone through severe financial difficulties in recent years.
Those difficulties reshaped much of Embracer's portfolio. The company laid off thousands of employees, sold Gearbox Entertainment at a steep discount, and announced plans to split into three separate publicly listed companies. The troubles at the parent company have cast a shadow over its subsidiaries, including Vertigo.
Vertigo Games has two offices in the Netherlands, one in Amsterdam and one in Rotterdam, and employs 150 people overall. The fate of the Rotterdam studio was not made clear in the announcement. That office worked on the VR zombie survival franchise Arizona Sunshine, one of the better-known titles in the company's catalog.
The Amsterdam studio was founded by the same people who created Guerrilla Games, the developer behind the Horizon Zero Dawn franchise. Vertigo's other virtual reality titles include Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow and Star Trek: Bridge Crew.
The closure adds to a pattern of contraction in the VR gaming space, where hardware adoption has remained slower than many in the industry anticipated. Stitselaar's comment that the market remains challenging reflects a sentiment that has run through the VR industry for several years, as studios weigh the cost of developing for a platform that has yet to reach mainstream scale.
