An Insider Gaming report says Glowmade Games will lay off employees in January 2026 after its debut game, the Amazon-published King of Meat, flopped badly. While the number of employees being put out of work isn't known, sources told the site that the process began earlier this month with discussions about voluntary redundancies that would impact about a dozen people.
Word of the layoffs, confirmed by multiple Glowmade employees on LinkedIn, comes just a couple months after the release of King of Meat, a "co-op party platformer" for up to four players. It's yet another ugly outcome for a game studio, but what makes this case particularly interesting is that the report claims "leadership"—whether that's at Glowmade or Amazon isn't specified—was expecting a concurrent player count for King of Meat of at least 100,000.
The actual number? On Steam, it peaked at just 320, according to SteamDB, a number it only managed to achieve thanks to a free weekend. The player count quickly tailed off after that to double-digits, and at this moment sits at just 12, enough to populate three matches.
That doesn't tell the full story, since King of Meat is also available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. But even if each of those platforms had 100 times as many players as Steam, which seems extremely unlikely, King of Meat would still only be 1/50th (figures approximate, I am bad at math) of the way toward the minimum number of players anticipated by management.
That's not just a big flop, it also speaks very poorly of the judgment of the high-ups who thought this game would be a hit on that scale. We can't say for certain whether that reported figure is accurate, but we can say that a lot of money and effort was poured into marketing King of Meat, including an announcement trailer at the Geoff Keighley-hosted Opening Night Live show at Gamescom 2024—that couldn't have been cheap—and an entire Mr. Beast special, complete with $250,000 prize.
Optimism is great—you won't get far in the videogame business without it—but the expectations placed on King of Meat were wildly out of place. And that's not just hindsight speaking: Turn the page back to that ONL reveal in August 2024, when PC Gamer senior editor Wes Fenlon said King of Meat "seems doomed to be a casualty of the live service era before it's even out."
What comes next for King of Meat isn't clear, but probably nothing good. Amazon made major cuts to its gaming business as part of a massive wave of layoffs in October, which also saw it pull the plug on New World, a not-terribly-old MMO that was still attracting a decent audience. If New World can't make it on Amazon's watch, I don't imagine King of Meat has much hope for a bright future either.
I've reached out to Glowmade for comment and will update if I receive a reply.
