Ustwo cuts toward smaller core teams as Monument Valley budgets reach £7m-£10m

Ustwo is spelling out the financial math behind its shift away from the old Monument Valley model. In comments published by Game Developer on April 28, CEO Maria Sayans said the studio has recently been making games that cost between £7 million and £10 million, with production cycles stretching across three to four years. For a studio with just under 30 employees today and roughly 40 at the peak of Monument Valley 3 production, that budget structure no longer looks safe enough if the goal is to build for PC and console without depending on the old mobile-platform support system.

The backdrop is a business pivot that has been building for months. Sayans said Ustwo had already concluded that mobile no longer provided a solid base for a long-term business, and the studio also lost the kind of publishing support deals that once helped it launch on phones first and then expand elsewhere. The company has since ported Monument Valley, Alba, and Assemble with Care to platforms including Steam and Nintendo Switch. Those ports sold in the hundreds of thousands, which Sayans described as decent rather than explosive. That result was enough to prove the audience exists, but not enough to justify carrying the same cost base forward unchanged.

The clearest operational shift is staffing. Sayans said future growth will come through contractors and co-development partners while Ustwo keeps a smaller core team in-house, even though she openly said she hates that direction as an industry norm. She also tied the sustainability problem to pricing. Ustwo has historically sold games cheaply, but Sayans argued that underpricing at launch puts the team itself at risk and that the difference between £5 and £10 is often negligible for committed day-one buyers. In other words, the studio is not only shrinking its permanent headcount expectations, it is also preparing players for firmer launch pricing on PC storefronts like Steam.

The Reddit response focused on tone as much as substance. One of the most upvoted replies argued that the full quote sounds more nuanced than the headline, because Sayans also said she dislikes the contractor-heavy model. Even so, the thread still read the comments as a blunt admission that long-term job security is being deprioritized in favor of flexibility and survival. That is the real weight of the story. Ustwo is not announcing layoffs in this interview. It is describing the staffing and pricing logic it now believes a mid-size game studio needs in order to keep building games at all.

Source: Game Developer report · Reddit discussion