Firaxis Games, the developer behind the Civilization series and many other games bearing co-founder Sid Meier's namesake, has reportedly laid off multiple employees in early September 2025. The scope of the layoffs at Firaxis Games is not clear, but it's the latest bit of news in an ongoing trend of mass internal restructuring that has many players and workers in the gaming business feeling nervous for the future.
Firaxis was founded in 1996 by Meier, Jeff Briggs, and Brian Reynolds, ahead of Hasbro's acquisition of MicroProse, another company that Meier co-founded. While the first two games in the Civilization series were developed and published under the MicroProse name, Firaxis has carried on their legacy with five more mainline titles and a few spin-offs, with Civilization 7 launching this past February. Over the course of the last three decades, the company has been behind a variety of other popular strategy and simulation games, including the XCOM series, Sid Meier's Pirates, and Marvel's Midnight Suns.
But despite its dedicated fan base in a somewhat niche strategy games market, new reports state that an unspecified number of employees has been laid off from the publisher and developer. Former Firaxis writer...
