Fourteen employees of the Reykjavik based mobile games company Plain Vanilla have been laid of since today. This makes for 20 per cent of the companies staff, counting approximately 80 people until now.
Plain Vanilla earned its name for developing the award-winning app QuizUp, “the world’s first Real-Time Social Trivia Platform for mobile devices.” according to the company’s Facebook side.
The layoffs are clearly related to the fact that the United States based gaming company Glu Mobile is taking over a majority share of Plain Vanilla. According to Morgunblaðið the merge of the two companies is imminent in the next 15 months.
According to Icelandic media Stundin, A portion of the layoffs comes from the content department, a department responsible for producing the questions for QuizUp. Two employees further state that the company has been “burning money” of late.
It has been both rumored and reported in the last few months that the staff of the Plain Vanilla has had much unrest and that finances of the company have been week. The annual finance report of Plain Vanilla for last year shows that operating costs have been enormous, two billion ISKR in the past two years, however operation results last year were 845 million ISKR and 222 million ISKR the year before, as reported by Stundin, the revenue chiefly coming from shareholders abroad. Viðskiptablaðið reported last week that employment costs alone reached 873 million in 2014.