Schell Games Cut About 40% of Staff Ten Weeks After Its First Layoffs in 24 Years

Schell Games cut about 40% of its staff. The studio announced it in a LinkedIn post on Saturday, October 31. Chief executive Jesse Schell confirmed the proportion afterward, describing it as "about 40% of the studio."

That is twice in ten weeks. The first came on August 21 and took roughly 14 people, counted from employee posts rather than any company statement. It was the first layoff in the studio's 24 years. Schell put the remaining headcount near 125 after that round. Road to VR carried the arithmetic forward and arrived at roughly 50 people cut this time, leaving about 75. That number is an inference. Schell Games has published no headcount.

A crewmate in a top hat walks a dim spaceship corridor toward a pink and a purple crewmate in Among Us 3D, with the task list and ship map on screen — Among Us 3D, co-developed by Schell Games and Innersloth. Image: Innersloth / Steam

The affected roles cover most of the building. Unity and Unreal engineers, artists, designers, sound designers and producers. Marketing, IT support, QA and product management. Educational game researchers too, and that last category is the one that explains how the studio was built.

Two legs, and the one that was supposed to hold

Schell Games ran original VR titles alongside a contract and education business. I Expect You To Die, Until You Fall and Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire sat on one side. Museum, classroom and corporate work sat on the other. The services leg was meant to absorb the risk the games created. That was the design.

Schell summed the model up in a 2024 GamesIndustry.biz interview: "We'll put cash at risk when we make a game, but we don't put jobs at risk." By the press arithmetic, two rounds have now cost about 64 jobs.

Its stated reason this time was the market. The LinkedIn post cited "this challenging time in the game industry," said the cuts would let it "stay stable moving forward," and described the goal as "a sustainable future for our studio."

An armored knight with glowing cracks and a wooden shield stands in a neon-lit ruin in Until You Fall — Until You Fall, the studio's 2020 roguelite. Image: Schell Games / Steam

The company it keeps

Schell is not alone this year. Polyarc cut deep in April, and Mighty Coconut announced a second round in September as new Walkabout Mini Golf players thinned out. In October, Owlchemy's chief executive argued that the studios cutting staff had ignored the data pointing at social games. Schell Games fits that theory awkwardly. It co-develops Among Us 3D, which is a social game by any definition.

What it means if you own one of these games

The catalogue is the open question. Schell Games has live obligations across I Expect You To Die 3 and Among Us 3D, the latter co-developed with Innersloth and published by it. It also has Dragon Grove in development, a free-to-play mixed reality puzzler announced at Meta Connect for Quest 3 and Meta VR Glasses in spring 2027. The studio has not said which projects the cut touches. A team near 75 supports less than a team near 125 does. Anyone holding a Schell title and expecting continued updates, or waiting on Dragon Grove, should treat the roadmap as unconfirmed until the studio addresses it directly.