Daily fantasy sports operator FanDuel is laying off staff at its Florida office as the company circles the financial wagons.
On Wednesday, multiple Florida media outlets reported that FanDuel was laying off 55 employees at its Maitland office effective April 10. The news follows last month’s reports that FanDuel was cutting payroll at its New York headquarters.
FanDuel issued a statement saying the cuts would target “a group of developers in the Orlando office that were focused on R&D for ancillary games and applications that we will not be investing in moving forward.”
The announcement comes less than a year after FanDuel rode to the rescue of 38 Orlando-based developers who’d been let go by social gamers Zynga after the latter firm decided to shed its nascent Zynga Sports 365 franchise.
FanDuel said the affected employees would receive two-month severance packages and the company was helping these staffers find employment elsewhere. The cuts reduce FanDuel’s Orlando contingent to about 20 staff but the company said that the Maitland facility would remain open and the company remained committed to “building out our customer service operations” in the state “despite regulatory pressure” on the DFS industry.
The entire DFS industry has been under sustained assault since the ‘data leak’ scandal broke in October. Since then, a multitude of state attorneys general have declared DFS to be illegal gambling, payment processors have sought to curtail their DFS activity and reporters at major media outlets like the New York Times and PBS’ Frontline have put DFS in the investigative hot seat.
FanDuel’s bad news comes after a truly downer day for rival DraftKings, which saw its highly public exclusive marketing deal with ESPN come to a premature conclusion, while investor 21st Century Fox claimed its $160m stake had lost 60% of its value in the past six months.
