RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Three months after the release of Directive 8020 , Supermassive Games is laying off employees. In a brief message posted on X , the studio said it has begun a redundancy process that will see up to 75 of its people put out of work.
"This is a necessary step to help ensure the sustainability of the company," Supermassive said.
(Image credit: Supermassive Games (Twitter))
The layoffs come in the wake of a mixed response to Directive 8020 (although PC Gamer's Elie Gould thoroughly enjoyed it, calling the game "one giant leap for sci-fi body horror" in their 85% review ), but that reception feels almost irrelevant. This is the third round of layoffs at Supermassive in less than three years, the previous rounds of cuts in 2024 and 2025 also citing the catastrophic state of the games industry and urgent need to do something —which invariably works out to putting people out of work—in response.
That's no lie. The videogame industry is in upheaval, and thousands of developers are being let go every year , seemingly irrespective of the success of their work; veteran Brenda Romero said earlier this year that "we were there in the '80s for the crash, and this is definitely crashier ."
That said, the whole 'we have to cut to survive' thing gets a little hard to swallow when big companies are raking in billions upon billions every year , and top executives are taking home multi-million-dollar incomes . Supermassive isn't Blizzard , but it is a division of Nordisk Film, which is owned by Egmont Group, which had an operating profit of €140 million ($162 million) on revenues of €2.2 billion ($2.5 billion) in 2025.
How many people will be left at Supermassive following this latest round of layoffs wasn't said. I've reached out to Supermassive for more information and will update if I receive a reply.
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