FaZe Clan to lay off 40% of staff amid economic struggles

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by Jacob Solomon May 20, 2023 News
FaZe Clan to lay off 40% of staff amid economic struggles

May 19, 2023  •  3 min read  •  By Alexander Lee

FaZe Clan, which went public at a $725 million valuation last year, laid off 40% of its staff this morning. The ongoing collapse of FaZe, an organization that observers have long viewed as a bellwether for the industry at large, is one of the signs of the mounting esports winter.

FaZe Clan has already laid off 20 percent of their staff in February. Lee Trink sent an email to all FaZe staffers at 10:00 a.m., telling them of the layoffs. Trink said that the decision was due to broader economic headwinds, as well as a heavy focus on our costs and redefine our structure to set us up for the best possible future. At some point today, affected employees were told that they would receive a calendar invite.

Trink wrote in the email that they were setting some of their larger goals aside so they could focus on what was in front of them. The representatives of the FaZe Clan did not return calls before the report was published.

The exact number of laid-off employees is not known, but FaZe Clan employs as many as 200 people, meaning a 40 percent layoff could cause up to 80 workers to leave the company.

After hitting a high of $24.69 in August 2022, the company's share price has plummeted. In recent months, some of FaZe Clan's creator- founders have spoken out about the mismanagement of the company.

Greg Selkoe, the former president of FaZe Clan, sold all of his equity back to them after he left. It was a lot of chaos that didn't work for me and we were swimming upstream to do stuff that was natural to us.

FaZe Clan's problems are not limited to its finances. According to the data platform GEEIQ, the org has a total social following of over 300 million and a fan base of over 300 million.

I don't think that's the case with FaZe because they seem to have a long and storied history with issues like this. I don't believe that these teams know the people that they work with well.