Life is Strange: True Colors developer Deck Nine Games announced that it would be laying off staff. The studio mentioned the games industry’s worsening market conditions as the reason for the cuts.
“Today we made the difficult decision to lay off 20% of our staff. These people are amazing, talented, and awesome developers,” Deck Nine said on Twitter. “They have made a huge impact during their time at Deck Nine Games and we did not take this decision lightly.”
Game director Stephan Frost also said that leadership took pay cuts in order to reduce the number of impacted employees as much as possible. “This is the strongest team D9 has ever been and it absolutely sucks that the industry is in the state that it is presently,” he explained.
Deck Nine already suffered a round of layoffs back in May 2023. The studio worked on Life is Strange: Before the Storm in 2017 and took over the series from original developer Don’t Nod with Life is Strange: True Colors in 2021. Since then, Deck Nine has released Life is Strange Remastered Collection and The Expanse: A Telltale Series.
The games industry has been ravaged with layoffs. Just this week, Until Dawn and The Quarry developer Supermassive Games announced that it would be laying off 90 of its employees. And just this morning, Sony laid off 900 developers across its first party studios, including Naughty Dog, Insomniac Games, and Guerrilla Games.