Walkabout Mini Golf developer Mighty Coconut announced its second round of layoffs in 2026 with ten people affected.
On the same day that Walkabout Mini Golf’s next DLC course was announced, Lucas Martell released a statement on LinkedIn about Mighty Coconut’s latest downsizing.
Here is the statement in full:
This is an incredibly hard message to write, but I want to continue to be transparent with the Walkabout community. Due to the current state of the games industry and especially VR, Mighty Coconut will need to downsize, and over the next several months we will be saying goodbye to 10 talented people who have helped make Walkabout what it is.
For anyone who has been following the games industry, VR in particular is going through a very rough time. I am confident that VR will continue to be an amazing medium, but it is going through a massive and rapid shift as funding, hardware and press attention have largely been diverted elsewhere. While we already downsized last January, I failed to anticipate just how rapidly and deeply this trajectory would continue. The amazing courses and worlds created by our talented team have allowed us to fare better than many studios who have had to close completely, but without a steady stream of new players coming into VR and Walkabout, the scale at which we’ve been operating is no longer sustainable.
For our fans, I just want to continue to reassure you that Walkabout isn’t going anywhere. We will continue to release courses, although these might be a little less often due to the reduced team size that returns us to the small and scrappy way we started. We also plan to continue work on Walkabout Dungeon Golfer and Grass as new games are the best way to diversify our revenue stream and stabilize things. While incredibly painful, this is the only course of action that allows us to keep the game alive, the servers active, and hold on to as much of our team as possible.
For anyone in the game industry looking to hire some of the best people around, we are putting together a reverse-recruiting list with several talented individuals who are looking for an opportunity. You won’t be disappointed.
The company cut twenty-five percent of its staff at the beginning of this year and raised the price of its paid DLC courses one dollar from $3.99 to $4.99. The standout tidbit in Martell’s statement for me is “without a steady stream of new players coming into VR and Walkabout, the scale at which we’ve been operating is no longer sustainable.” Mighty Coconut already reduced its number of DLC course releases to six this year, though we did get the Homestar Runner Pack this summer as a bonus add-on out of said course schedule.
Walkabout Mini Golf laid off some workers and announced a price increase for future DLC.
UploadVRIan Hamilton
That said, every game studio can see metrics like new user counts, concurrent players, purchasing trends, and so on. If these are on the decline, even for games like Walkabout that have recurring revenue in the form of regular DLC, decisions like this are sadly inevitable. Walkabout has already seen an expansion of its paid content with avatar packs, hole celebrations, and ball trails in conjunction with the new courses to increase the potential revenue per player. This is a savvy, shrewd business move in the face of declining numbers, but based on today’s news, it is not enough to offset the decline we are seeing in VR and gaming as a whole. A decline that has seen other layoffs and studio closures dating back several years now.
Martell also says that the staff reduction may lead to a slower cadence of DLC course releases. Martell and other Mighty Coconut staff have told us that the course schedule was already set through 2027 prior to today’s layoffs. Work will also continue on the spinoff Walkabout Dungeon Golfer and the team’s work to help ship flatscreen lawn mowing simulator Grass.
