Directive 8020 studio Supermassive Games cuts more than 70 roles
The Guildford studio behind Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology has lost more than 70 staff as the redundancy round it announced in August is carried through.
More than 70 people have left Supermassive Games, the Guildford studio behind Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology, after a redundancy round the company announced in August was carried through this week.
Departing staff confirmed the scale of the cuts publicly. Frank Tindle, who joined the studio in 2010 as its entire IT department and left as IT and facilities director on the senior leadership team, wrote that more than 70 colleagues were going. "Developers, artists, producers, QA, operations and more," he said. Tim Browning, the studio's talent acquisition lead, also posted about his departure.
A third round in three years
Supermassive announced in August that up to 75 roles were at risk, describing the move as a "necessary step to help ensure the sustainability of the company" and promising support for those affected. Directive 8020, its sci-fi horror entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology, had arrived in May 2026 to mixed reviews.
The pattern is not new. In July 2025 the studio cut 36 roles while pushing Directive 8020 from October 2025 to May 2026, and in February 2024 around 90 employees were affected as it entered a consultation period. Supermassive has grown from a handful of people to more than 400, and it recently said online multiplayer would come to Directive 8020 this month.
What happens to the studio next
Supermassive has not announced further cuts, and its public release schedule still lists Directive 8020 and Little Nightmares III content. Nor has it said how the smaller team changes what it can build next, which is the question that matters most for a studio whose reputation rests on branching, performance-driven horror rather than the scale of its headcount.
Our opinion
Three redundancy rounds in three years is no longer a bad patch, it is a business model, and the studio's own words give the game away. Each statement has promised to "focus on core strengths" and "align the team structure", which in practice means shrinking until the remaining staff can carry a shipping schedule built for a bigger studio. What makes this one sting is the timing: Directive 8020 was the game the earlier cuts were taken to protect, and it still could not hold the line. Supermassive's real problem is not headcount, it is that horror games with branching stories need long, expensive productions their current release cadence cannot fund. Cutting deeper buys months, not a future.