Following a couple of sympathy tweets about layoffs hitting Guitar Hero, Dance Central and Rock Band creator Harmonix last night, a spokesperson for the developer has confirmed that a number of employees were let go.
"We can confirm that a small number of Harmonix employees were let go today," a Harmonix spokesperson told Polygon. "This decision was made due to shifting staffing priorities for Harmonix's multiple future projects."
The news comes about a month after the developer landed the involvement of venture capital firm The Foundry Group. At the time, group managing director Brad Feld wrote that he met with Harmonix founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy last fall to see three new games that the company is working on.
Harmonix revealed that it was working on three games (at least one of which was a real-time combat game) last June.
A source tells Polygon that the recent layoffs impacted about ten employees and that the layoffs were tied to typical downsizing that hits a project over the course of development.
This morning, superannuation pointed out that Zak McClendon, BioShock 2's lead designer, updated his LinkedIn profile to list himself as the design director at Harmonix. Michelle Mangio, the manager of engineering and platform integration at Turbine, also started at Harmonix this week, according to LinkedIn. Her new title is director of Quality Assurance, according to her profile.