Life is Strange and The Expanse devs lay off 20% of studio in second wave of job losses in under a year
Deck Nine blame “the game industry’s worsening market conditions”
The developers behind the Life is Strange remaster, spin-offs Before the Storm and True Colors, and The Expanse: A Telltale Series, Deck Nine, have laid off 20% of the studio’s staff due to “the game industry’s worsening market conditions”. The latest job losses are the second wave of layoffs at the company in the last 12 months.
Deck Nine took up the mantle for developing the Life is Strange series from Dontnod with Chloe-focused prequel Before the Storm in 2017, later going on to introduce a new protagonist in Alex Chen and more mature tone with 2021’s spin-off True Colors. In 2022, the studio revisited the original Life is Strange and Before the Storm with the Remastered Collection.
Most recently, Deck Nine co-created an episodic game based on novel series-turned-TV show The Expanse in collaboration with Telltale Games, marking that studio’s rebirth after the original Telltale’s closure in 2018. The new Telltale suffered their own layoffs last year as part of the games industry’s ongoing butchery of its talent.
Deck Nine’s layoffs saw a fifth of the studio lose their jobs yesterday, according to a statement posted to X that blamed “worsening market conditions” for the “difficult decision”.
“These people are amazing, talented, and awesome developers," the studio said. "They have made a huge impact during their time at Deck Nine Games and we did not take this decision lightly. Please hire these people if you can, they're amazing."
According to game director Stephan Frost, Deck Nine’s leadership cut their pay in order to minimise the number of layoffs, estimated to be around 30 people.
“This is the strongest team D9 has ever been and it absolutely sucks that the industry is in the state that it is presently,” Frost added.
The latest layoffs mark the second time Deck Nine has been hit by job cuts in under a year, after 30 staff were let go last May, and several narrative leads voluntarily resigned to minimise further losses, as reported by Game Developer at the time.
Deck Nine’s layoffs join more than 900 layoffs across Sony studios including Naughty Dog, Guerilla and Insomniac this week; the closure of Saltsea Chronicles studio Die Gute Fabrik after funding struggles; and expected job losses at The Quarry and Until Dawn developers Supermassive, in a 2024 that has already seen an estimated 7,000 layoffs across the games industry in under two months, compared to around 10,500 during the whole of last year.