Eidos has closed its Rockpool Games studio in Manchester, with fourteen of its staff made redundant.

Rockpool Games was acquired by Eidos in February 2007 as part of the publisher’s efforts to succeed in the browser and mobile games sector. It is not known if the 14 redundancies make up the entire studio’s workforce; when sold to Eidos, the Manchester studio had 36 staff members.

At the time, Eidos stated that it had purchased the studio due to the projected growth of the mobile games sector. Today, an Eidos spokesperson told Develop that "as a company we need to focus our efforts on high-quality titles that will deliver long-term franchise value, and in these incredibly challenging and competitive times we need to pro-actively manage our cost base.”

Such cost-cutting measures are a necessity for Eidos; the publisher’s fate in hard times was going to be determined by the commercial response to its core IP, Tomb Raider. Sales of Lara’s latest title, unfortunately, were short of Eidos’ internal sales projections, and the publisher had to revise its expected revenues to £160-180m, down from its previous guidance of £180-200m. The spokesperson stressed the difficulty in reaching the decision to close the studio.

It is not believed that there is any link between the closing of the studio and Eidos’ ongoing talks with an unnamed suitor interested in purchasing the publisher.