Reports of a new round of GameStop layoffs have surfaced, with several of the gaming company’s crypto wallet engineers being affected.

According to a purported email from its CEO, the layoffs were initiated upon gaining clarity as to the “right level,” of staff needed.

Holiday Layoffs

There is never a good time to receive the news that you’ve lost your job, though the holiday season might be one of the worst times — as many are dependent on bonuses, and their income as spending usually ramps up.

Reports of the layoffs were first shared by Axios, although, the exact number of individuals affected is yet to be made public at the time of writing.

“We’ve continued to gain clarity regarding the right level of corporate staff needed to achieve our profitability and growth goals,” shared CEO Matt Furlong in an email, according to Ethan Gach, a senior reporter at gaming publication Kotaku.

Since the news broke, several engineers have seemingly come forward to share their experiences on platforms like LinkedIn. Including Brandon Jenniges, who wrote “Unfortunately I was impacted by layoffs at GameStop today. I had a great time getting a deep dive into Ethereum and learning about many new things in the crypto space.”

Crypto Winter to Blame?

Exchanges are not the only platforms that have been hard hit in the last few months. While GameStop’s launch into the NFT space came with high short-term volume and was met with great enthusiasm, the platform has since fallen flat in comparison to its competitors.

According to data from DappRadar, as shared by Decrypt, analytics from October 21 show that the platform yielded roughly $29 million USD in trading volume since its launch — with leading NFT marketplace OpenSea trading $6 million USD in volume on a daily basis.

Simply put, it has taken GameStop four months to produce the same amount of volume achieved by OpenSea in just over four days.

Perhaps if the platform had launched in the middle of a bull run this might be a different story, however, this is the unfortunate case for many in the bear market.

Despite these factors and the newly announced layoffs, GameStop continues to pursue the Web3 space, recently announcing a highly anticipated partnership with Immutable X.

In other news, Apple bans NFT transfers on mobile apps Like Coinbase Wallet and Ledger Live.