Up to 30 Workers Laid Off in Ignite Reorganization

Computer game maker Ignite Inc. laid off as many as 30 full-time and contract workers Monday as it completed the second round of a reorganization that began in April.

Most of the workers were in the Irvine-based company’s Los Angeles offices, which have been closed.

Ignite, formerly called Graphix Zone, now has about 15 full-time and contract employees and is concentrating on its TV-game-show-derived Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune computer games, said David Hirschhorn, co-chairman and chief executive.

Hirschhorn said he could not provide more specific information about the number of layoffs and the split between regular and contract employees until a public announcement is made later this week.

Hirschhorn, part of a team hired in April to save the publicly traded company from insolvency, laid off 30 employees and terminated most of the company’s game-development activities soon after arriving.

Since then, he said Monday, Ignite has started bringing in more money than it spends and has several new games that it is readying for distribution in the third quarter.

But to continue operating, Ignite “needed to get to where we were doing the most we could with the fewest number of people,” he said, explaining Monday’s layoffs.

The company intends to continue acquiring rights to TV-based shows. But instead of developing the computer game versions in-house as before, Ignite will co-develop and co-publish the games with other game developers and distributors, Hirschhorn said.

Ignite’s thinly traded stock closed unchanged Monday at 21.9 cents a share in the Nasdaq small cap market.