Red Dead Redundancies: Rockstar San Diego faces lay offs

Triple-A game development downside #4567327: post-development lay offs. Designing a massive, "yee-haw"-inducing wild west from the ground-up and expanding it through bite-sized DLC chunks are two entirely different things, and, unfortunately, one of them requires far fewer people to pull off.

Translation: Rockstar San Diego's looking a bit more like a tumbleweed-infested ghost town these days, seeing as there wasn't room enough in said town for roughly 40 employees. Or at least, that's according to Kotaku, who cited the usual "sources close to the developer."

Rockstar, meanwhile, wouldn't divulge any numbers, but did acknowledge a team size "fluctuation."

"As is typical with game development, our team sizes have always fluctuated over the course of the development cycle. As Rockstar San Diego transitions from the launch of Red Dead Redemption onto future projects, we are realigning our resources in order to continue to develop games as effectively as possible," studio manager Steve Martin said in a statement.

"We are ensuring that all employees who are affected by these changes are being treated with care. While we have no announcements to make regarding a sequel to Red Dead Redemption, the team here are hard at work on the development of downloadable content for the game," he added.

We can only hope it somehow involves Cougar Man - easily the game's most compelling character.