MMO developer Bigpoint, the studio behind Battlestar Galactica Online, has laid off 120 workers, more than a third of whom were from the company's San Francisco studio. The rest were from administrative departments in the company's Hamburg, Germany headquarters. The company is cutting out its development efforts in the US, claiming that development in the regional is not efficient.

"The games that we have developed in the last two years haven't been that successful, and the San Francisco area and Bay Area is quite a competitive market," Hubertz told Games Industry International (via Gamasutra). "San Francisco is, after New York, one of the most expensive cities you can live in in the US, so the people are quite expensive."

This comes among other large shake-ups in the company. It recently closed its mobile division, laying off 29 employees and canceling multiple games in the process. Company CEO Heiko Hubertz is also stepping down for personal reasons, with plans to announce a new CEO at the end of the year.

Bigpoint says that its current projects in development won't be impacted by this round of layoffs.