Life Is Strange: True Colors and The Expanse: A Telltale Series developer Deck Nine Games is the latest studio to be hit by the ongoing wave of industry layoffs.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Deck Nine confirms that it has been affected by the industry’s “worsening market conditions”, causing it to lay off 20% of its workforce. The studio does not clarify how many employees this amounts to.
Deck Nine game director Stephan Frost elaborates on the situation in a post of his own, stating that the studio’s leadership “took paycuts to keep the number down as much as possible”, a move also embraced by Ruined King developer Airship Syndicate.
Deck Nine says that the staff it’s letting go are “amazing, talented, and awesome developers”, and that the studio “did not take [its decision] lightly”.
That’s a sentiment echoed by Frost, who says that Deck Nine’s team is “the strongest” it’s ever had and that it “absolutely sucks that the industry is in the state that it is presently”.
We don’t yet know how these layoffs will affect the projects Deck Nine has in the pipeline, but the announcement post doesn’t explicitly refer to the cancellation or delay of any upcoming games as a result of the cuts.
Deck Nine’s story is becoming more and more common among both indie studios and AAA outfits alike.
As well as the Life Is Strange: True Colors developer and the aforementioned Airship Syndicate, other studios who have let staff go in recent months include Supermassive Games, Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM, and Homeworld 3 studio Blackbird Interactive.
They join a host of other studios hit by layoffs, like tabletop giant Hasbro, Amazon’s gaming division, and Destiny 2 developer Bungie, among a litany of other names.
It seems like we’re sadly not done with the industry wave of layoffs and studio closures yet. Stay tuned for more news on this.
