A San Francisco game studio backed by casino giant Las Vegas Sands has shut its doors, leaving as many as 440 people without jobs just as the company's flagship mobile title was headed for the digital graveyard. Fortis Games, founded in 2022, confirmed its closure this week alongside plans to shut down its game Twilight Towers on November 16.
A Five-Year Bet That Didn't Pay Off
According to GamesBeat, which first reported the closure, Fortis could be shedding as many as 440 jobs. Fortis CEO Steven Chiang said the studio had fallen short of its own ambitions, telling the outlet, “we weren’t able to achieve the goals we set for ourselves when we started this journey more than five years ago.” Chiang previously served as executive vice president of worldwide studios for WB Games and joined Zynga in 2010, and he built Fortis around a belief that games-as-a-service and free-to-play models could attract broad, lasting audiences.
Fortis was based in San Francisco and drew leadership from Electronic Arts, WB Games, Zynga and Smule, according to the same GamesBeat report. The company said it had initially focused on a next-generation games-as-a-service model, with founders hoping games could grow into digital societies and even become the primary form of social entertainment, believing online social experiences could be more positive and meaningful than what existed before.
Twilight Towers Couldn't Hold Players
Fortis said it had worked for several months to improve Twilight Towers, introducing new features, redesigning major systems, and using progress resets and map changes to try to keep the game alive. Despite that effort, the studio said the game never found enough staying power, telling GamesBeat, “we just weren’t seeing strong enough player retention to make the game sustainable.” The company added that keeping a live game running takes ongoing investment in development, content, servers, and player support — a burden it was apparently no longer positioned to carry.
Separate reporting from Mobilegamer.biz noted that Twilight Towers reached soft launch in September 2025, and that Fortis had launched in 2022 with 150 staff gained through the acquisition of three studios: Doppio Games in Portugal, Oktagon Games in Brazil, and Metagame in Romania, per GamesBeat. Mobilegamer.biz also cited AppMagic data showing that two other Fortis titles struggled badly — Bloom & Breakfast reached early testing and picked up a small number of downloads, while Mergemon Wilds never registered any installs at all.
The Las Vegas Sands Connection
Fortis received its initial funding from Las Vegas Sands, the casino and resort company founded by Sheldon Adelson, and the gambling giant was expected to be a long-term investor in the studio, according to GamesBeat. Las Vegas Sands president Patrick Dumont said in 2022 that the company was assembling a team to build games from the ground up as part of a plan to make interactive entertainment a core pillar beyond gambling.
That long-term relationship appears to have ended abruptly. Former Fortis employee Gustavo Coronet said Las Vegas Sands chose to end funding and terminate contracts worldwide, telling GamesBeat that “Las Vegas Sands has chosen to end funding and part ways, terminating all of the contracts, worldwide.” Mobilegamer.biz said it had contacted Fortis for comment.
Employees Learn the News in Real Time
Word of the shutdown spread largely through employees themselves. Fortis employee Scott Butterworth said the company had officially shuttered, abruptly putting more than 400 people out of work, while another former staffer, Pedro Gomes, who had worked at Fortis for five years, said the company had officially shut down. Gustavo Coronet separately said the closure had happened abruptly. GamesBeat reported that Fortis employees had been posting on LinkedIn that they had been laid off or that the company was shutting down, suggesting many learned details of their own situation alongside the public.
Part of a Brutal Year for Game Studios
Fortis's collapse lands in the middle of what has already been one of the roughest years on record for the games industry. TweakTown, citing the ASGC Games Industry Layoffs Tracker, reported 10,977 layoffs through October 20, already topping the 9,197 recorded for all of 2025, with the tracker projecting the total could reach roughly 13,077 by year's end. Separately, Insider Gaming reported more than 12,000 known jobs lost in 2026, estimating the real figure is likely closer to 13,000 to 14,000 — a different tally with its own cutoff, underscoring how inconsistent industry-wide counts remain depending on source and timing.
TweakTown also reported that around 35 studios have closed this year and 161 have been hit by layoffs, including EA's October 21 decision to close BioWare and cancel early development on its next Mass Effect project, part of roughly 400 job cuts across EA according to Bloomberg reporting cited by the outlet. Against that backdrop, Fortis's shutdown is one more entry in a year that has already reshaped the studio landscape well beyond San Francisco.
