Until Dawn developer Supermassive Games set to lay off another 36 employees after a 'redundancy consultation process', delays Directive 8020 to 2026

Supermassive, developer of Until Dawn and Little Nightmares, is set to lay off another 36 employees before the release of Directive 8020, which is now being delayed to 2026. While the game itself looks interesting, trading the Wendigo for Ridley-esque alien horrors, there'll be around three dozen staff not making it to launch day.

That's per a post to X, and—look, you don't need to tell me that the industry's a nightmare, unless this is the first news article you've read in 20 years. In which case, welcome back and I'm sorry. Still, Supermassive's using traditionally frustrating language to inform the public it's laying people off. Take a look:

"The games industry remains a challenging and ever-evolving environment. As we adapt our team structure to better align with these changes, we've had to make the very difficult decision to begin a redundancy consultation process where we anticipate losing up to 36 of our colleagues."

Yeesh. "We anticipate losing"—I'm going to start declining invites by telling people that I anticipate vanishing from their birthday party. I'm not naive enough (though I'm perhaps tired enough) to suggest that every single lay off is due to capricious corporate meddling or large-scale acquisitions. However, would it kill for one of these announcements to just say the thing they're doing?

In fairness, the choice of language here could simply be due to UK labour laws, which require companies to notify people they'll be at-risk of being laid off during a consultation period that lasts at least 30 days (at layoffs of this size). So maybe I've just had my fill, and am looking too hard into legalese.

The announcement then goes on to clarify that Directive 8020 will be moved to "the first half of 2026".

This stands as the second round of layoffs the studio's endured—the first of which happened in February 2024, shortly after its founders stepped down after 16 years at the company. You'll be surprised to find out Supermassive used nearly identical language to describe it—the whims of challenging markets come for us all, apparently. What can you do? (Probably more than we're doing).