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SCi, the British company that bought larger home-ground rival Eidos after the launch of the highly-praised Tomb Raider Legend, is now faced with the same financial problems and an inevitable restructuring is looming.

Plans for a take over by a larger, deeper-pocketed company have been hovering SCi's Wimbeldon, London offices since last September. Discussions were held with an unnamed Chinese company and with US-based Time Warner, but it seems the company's board considered the $607 million market value too low for a potential acquisition, so they declined all offers.

As a consequence of poor sales and bad commercial strategy (SCi did not anticipate the Wii-mania, focusing instead on PlayStation 3 games), the management decided to cut more than 800 jobs, mainly at the company's headquarters, in order to cope with expenses. That means about 25 percent of the staff.

Moreover, no less than 14 games have been canned, "as they will not generate an acceptable return on investment or are not of sufficient quality", according to SCi's report for investors.

So the British gaming giant (the biggest publisher in the UK) is now left with a list of only 10 games for 2008, among them being the recently-launched Conflict: Denied Ops, some casual games and the sequel for Pony Friends (which SCi says sold more than 600,000 copies worldwide). The highly-anticipated Tomb Raider Underworld got unsurprisingly delayed until late 2008, but the reason behind this move is not the financial trouble, but the multi-platform-ism. SCi has plans to port the code not only on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but also on Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 2.

Not all's dark and gloomy in London however: the same announcement informing investors about the job-cuts also mentioned that IP Kane and Lynch Dead Men sold more than 1.4 million copies since November last year, signaling a bright future for the newly launched franchise. And speaking of franchises, the heavy ones already in possession of SCi (Hitman, Tomb Raider, Championship Manager and Deus Ex 3) are not going to be affected by the restructuring. Thank God...

Unfortunately, for 2008, SCi expects losses of 30 million pounds.