Another day, another lay off news.
Supermassive Games has started redundancy consultation that could cost up to 75 people their jobs, the third such process the Until Dawn studio has run in under three years. "We have made the difficult decision to begin a redundancy consultation process, which we anticipate will result in the loss of up to 75 of our colleagues," the studio wrote on August 11. "This is a necessary step to help ensure the sustainability of the company."
Stack it against the previous rounds and the scale becomes clear. Roughly 90 roles went in February 2024, another 36 in July 2025, and now up to 75 more. That's approaching 200 people cut from a single independent UK studio in thirty months. Supermassive hasn't said how many staff will remain.
The Timing Points Somewhere Specific
The statement doesn't blame any particular game, but the calendar does the work. Directive 8020, the fifth Dark Pictures entry, launched on May 12 after being delayed from October 2025, a delay announced alongside that previous round of 36 cuts. The layoffs arrive three months later.
Sales look like the issue rather than quality, and that distinction matters. Video Game Insight estimates roughly 447,000 units across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox, with other trackers closer to 500,000. For a full-priced, motion-captured production with a professional cast and Unreal Engine 5 costs, that isn't enough. Reception was mixed rather than poor, and some reviewers were genuinely enthusiastic, with PC Gamer scoring it 85% and calling it "one giant leap for sci-fi body horror." A well-reviewed game can still fail to find a big enough audience.
The Deeper Problem
The uncomfortable question isn't about one release. It's whether what Supermassive does has stopped working commercially.
Until Dawn was a phenomenon in 2015, establishing the cinematic horror-choice game as a category. Everything since, the whole Dark Pictures Anthology plus The Quarry, has refined the same loop: quick-time events, branching decisions, a recognisable cast, a butterfly-effect system. Directive 8020 pushed that into sci-fi aboard the colony ship Cassiopeia, a real attempt at freshness, but none of the follow-ups has matched Until Dawn's impact or sales. The studio has spent a decade iterating on a template that increasingly looks like it peaked immediately.
The language has barely changed across each round, from "we are not immune to this" in 2024 to "adapt our team structure" in 2025 to "sustainability" now. Each is true, and each lands on the same people. It fits the wider picture too, with the ASGC tracker projecting 14,259 industry job losses across 2026. Supermassive isn't an outlier, just a mid-sized independent caught between rising costs and an audience that hasn't grown to match.
More:GameStop's eBay Dream Shrinks From Takeover to Sales Pitch
Read
Source Editing
Visual Editing
Related news
