Wooga close Japan office

Wooga has now closed its Japan office as part of its previously announced restructuring process.

The company let go of 40 staff in August as it moved to restructure the business into three smaller studios, and also closed Warlords developer Black Anvil Games last month, claiming they’d be restructuring for smaller developments on puzzle, hidden object and casual simulation titles.

The Tokyo branch of Wooga was the company’s first overseas office, opened in 2014 to help create partnerships with local studios and support existing links. Jun Otsuka, who previously worked at Sega, was hired as Country Manager to look after the office, but has now left the company as a result of the office’s closure.

Wooga have claimed the the result is with the aim of focussing all localisation efforts to its office in Berlin. "Two years ago, Wooga set up a small satellite office in Tokyo in order to bolster and support local partnerships,” said Wooga in an emailed statement. “Unfortunately the future of this office was affected as part of our strategy shift to focus exclusively on casual games in August. In light of that change, we felt it necessary to once again centralise and focus all localisation efforts from our office in Berlin.

“While we’re happy to have been able to relocate a member of the team to Berlin, we regretfully had to part ways with two other employees. Although the team in Japan was small, their work was impressive and we would like to thank them for their hard work over the past two years.”