The number is not official. Game Developer’s Diego Argüello assembled it on August 25 by reading the LinkedIn posts employees published over the weekend, and the site says it contacted Schell Games for clarification. The studio has issued no public statement. Fourteen is a reasonable floor, not a confirmed headcount.
What the posts do establish is the spread. Marketing, art, design, and visual effects were all hit. Marketing director Dwayne Waite Jr confirmed the cuts reached his team and named four people. A senior public relations manager, nearly six years in, named more and added a line that says most of what needs saying about the current market: “I won’t pretend this isn’t a disappointing way to end this chapter.”
A principal engineering manager who kept his job wrote the sentence that traveled furthest. “This has happened not because of anything you did or did not do. Our industry (and beyond) right now is hemorrhaging.”
The studio that wrote the essay about not doing this
A cut of this size at a mid-size developer would not normally carry a thesis. This one does. Jesse Schell spent the better part of a decade as the founder other founders cited when they argued that job cuts are a choice rather than weather, and he made that case at length to GamesIndustry.biz in 2024 in a piece filed under the title Life without layoffs.
At the heart of it all is choosing not to put jobs at risk. We’ll put cash at risk when we make a game, but we don’t put jobs at risk. Even if our own IP brings in zero dollars, we still haven’t put any jobs at risk. We still have a path forward where we’ll be able to keep people on. So, in a lot of ways, it’s a choice.
Schell’s argument was structural. Keep a services and contract business running alongside original IP, and the contract work absorbs the risk that would otherwise land on people. Education clients, museums, location-based <a href="https://comicvibe.com/nine-<a href="https://comicvibe.com/lucky-strike-entertainment-shares-tumble-after-q4-revenue-misses-forecasts/” title=”Lucky Strike Entertainment shares tumble after Q4 revenue misses forecasts”>entertainment-asxnec-shares-retreat-as-fy26-revenue-and-profit-grow/” title=”Nine Entertainment (ASX:NEC) Shares Retreat as FY26 Revenue and Profit Grow”>entertainment, corporate training. When an original game underperforms, the studio has somewhere to put the team. That model held for more than two decades and through at least two VR winters, which is not nothing. The company has not said which side of it stopped working.
