Supermassive Games, the UK studio behind Until Dawn, The Quarry, and The Dark Pictures Anthology, has announced it is beginning a redundancy consultation process expected to result in the loss of up to 75 employees. In a statement shared on social media, the studio said the move was "a necessary step to help ensure the sustainability of the company" and pledged to prioritize support for those affected.
This marks the studio's third round of layoffs in roughly three years. Supermassive cut about 90 jobs in February 2024, then let go of up to 36 employees in July 2025 while delaying its game Directive 8020 from an original October 2025 release to the first half of 2026, citing a challenging market and the need for more development time.
Directive 8020 eventually launched on May 12, 2026 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. It is the first Dark Pictures entry set in a science-fiction setting, following survivors of a colony ship crash on the planet Tau Ceti f, with inspiration drawn from John Carpenter's The Thing. The game received mixed reception: critic scores sit around the low-70s, while Steam user reviews are roughly 63% positive. It peaked at just over 3,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch, later dropping to a few hundred, according to SteamDB data. By comparison, Supermassive's other recent release, Little Nightmares III, peaked at over 22,000 concurrent players, though that game also failed to gain a positive reception overall.
The new layoffs come less than three months after Directive 8020's launch, though Supermassive's announcement does not directly attribute the cuts to the game's performance, and the title's exact financial results have not been disclosed. The cuts also follow the June departure of CEO Pete Samuels, who stepped down about six weeks after the game's launch, saying he was honored to have guided the studio through a period of intense change.
Coverage notes that Supermassive's identity is built around cinematic, choice-driven games requiring large casts, performance capture, and lengthy development timelines, which are costly to produce and depend heavily on strong launch visibility and word of mouth. The repeated layoffs are described as reflecting both broader instability in the games industry and challenges specific to Supermassive's production model.