Following days of rumors about downsizing at Darkish Horse Media, the writer has issued a press release confirming that on February 3 it “made the tough however mandatory choice to scale back workers.” The assertion continued: “After experiencing a interval of great development, we discover ourselves needing to take steps in response to growing overhead, altering market circumstances, and exterior financial components. We’ve got begun to streamline all areas of the corporate as a way to proceed producing the standard content material and merchandise which were our trademark since day one. Once more, this has been a particularly onerous choice and never one taken calmly.”

Because the assertion suggests, Darkish Horse has been on one thing of a rollercoaster experience because it was acquired by the Swedish online game improvement firm, Embracer Group, in early 2022. Since that point, a deliberate $2 billion funding by the Saudi-backed Savvy Group fell by means of, and in mid 2023 Embracer introduced a restructuring that included downsizing its online game holdings. The downsizing didn’t resolve all of Embracer’s issues, nevertheless, although in its most up-to-date monetary report Embracer mentioned Darkish Horse backlist gross sales had been doing nicely.

The chapter by Diamond Comedian Distributors may additionally have been an element within the restructuring. This week the Beat reported that TFAW (Issues from One other World), a collectible vendor based by Richardson and owned by Darkish Horse, informed associates that they had been ending this system as of April 14. The story famous that whereas Diamond is most identified for its comics and graphic novel distribution enterprise, the corporate is a big provider of toys as nicely.

In the meantime, IDW Media Holdings’ annual report acknowledged that the corporate couldn’t but say what the impression of the Diamond chapter can have on the corporate. IDW, like Darkish Horse, is distributed by Penguin Random Home, and executives defined, on a convention name discussing the report, that PRH did not anticipate to gather all the cash it’s owed by Diamond, and subsequently could debit future funds to IDW. It wasn’t clear if Darkish Horse is dealing with these some points as nicely. (Within the days following the convention name, the Beat confirmed extra layoffs at IDW following the newest salvo final yr.)

This text has been up to date with additional data.