New layoffs just dropped

The axe fell: as the workers and the STJV feared two years ago, new layoffs will impact Don’t Nod.

The company wants to fire 90 persons, two thirds of the entire company, to reduce it to 49 workers.

How did we get here ?

The painful layoffs in 2024 did not save the company, as the management did not change. It even got more radical against its own workers, instead of doing its job and respecting the law.

For more than two years, Don’t Nod’s management has been incapable of signing any investment or publishing contract to keep making the last game under development at the studio. During these two years of harrowing production the workers gave everything they had, from an overblown Vertical Slice to multiple GamesCom demos, and including a full reboot of the project. Everyone could see the wall coming from afar but, as they always do, Don’t Nod’s executives ran straight toward it while repeating that maybe a miracle would move the wall.

Reading the publicly available financial documents, it is easy to realise that the company risks becoming insolvent in November 2026. This fact has been known for over a year, and the worker representatives have been warning about this risk since 2023! In the end, even the external auditors woke up and officially raised an alarm in spring 2026. In May 2026, Oskar Guilbert was defending his business recovery plan, claiming to increase marketing efforts on the game Aphelion after it had already bombed commercially, and bragging about a “record” 2025 annual turnover… which was less than 50% of the running costs of the company.

In the psycho-social risks assessment ordered by the company itself, all indicators are flashing red except one: sympathy between colleagues. The company executives therefore took the only logical decision: laying off our colleagues and more or less keeping only the upper echelons… wait what?

A good sense of timing

Worker representatives were summoned to a meeting on Friday, August 28th for a layoffs process starting on Thursday, September 3rd… the last day of production on yet another internal version of the game (the second one in less than a month) for potential investors. Conscious of how layoffs will give a bad image of the company, and in a last ditch effort to avoid disrupting this shaky final stretch, Oskar Guilbert is resorting to dirty tricks: on August 31st, he sent worker representatives a lawyer letter raising the spectre of insider trading and prison sentences, hoping to silence them.

Workers have been informed of the existence of upcoming layoffs, without any other details, on Tuesday, September 1st during an 8 minutes video call during which all means of communications were shut off. In the end, they learned about the number of planned layoffs on Friday morning in press articles, as journalists had been informed before them.

The workers’ understanding of this timing is the following: “now that you have crunched to produce in 4 months the best possible demo of the game’s reboot, we don’t need you anymore so please fuck off”.

The importance of being earnest

The organisation the layoffs plan wants to implement is quite simply laughable, nonsensical and completely unadapted to continue a game production to seek financial support. How does Don’t Nod’s upper management think it can keep on making a game which is very far from reaching the market? It’s a mystery.

Maybe they think they will be smart enough to scam financial partners into giving them enough money to survive a few months. Judging from recent history, we doubt they would be capable of doing that.

Or maybe they think that animators, character artists, environment artists and concept artists are not necessary to make a video game, which would justify laying off entirer teams.

Or, again, maybe the think they can find someone to buy a small studio and its intellectual property, after having removed the “troublemakers”?

Better dead than confronting worker representatives

Everyone will appreciate how the announced goal is to reduce the number of workers to 49. This number does not seem random, far from it, and it does not have any relation to production objectives or budget constraints.

Because 49 is just below the 50 workers threshold which, in France, gives worker representatives its most important rights and means: being a legal entity able to take legal action, having a budget, being able to hire experts, added protection for workers during layoffs… Everything that allowed us to force Don’t Nod’s management to face its own incompetence. Every single time, at Don’t Nod and elsewhere, executives only have one priority: fleeing their own responsibilities.

Furthermore these layoffs are targeting every worker representative, and would occur as their ongoing term is drawing to its end. The company’s management is seemingly trying to hit two birds with one stone, by removing workers it deems undesirable and trying to prevent any emergence of new, efficient representatives to defend the remaining workers.

It is the continuation of their ongoing strategy of harassing worker representatives, who are subjected to legal retaliation, sidelined, pushed to misconduct and pressured to quit. As recently as July 2026, 4 representatives had to declare an accident at work and then went on sick leave following “human resources” employees’ heinous behaviour during a meeting addressing workers’ health.

In France worker representatives mostly have a consultative role, a role which has been greatly weakened by Macron’s 2017 executive orders. Still, video game executives cannot bear the slightest contradiction, as they have repeatedly shown over the last few years. They would rather break their own toy on purpose than accept the presence of a few adults from time to time. This situation is met with a deafening, and maybe complicit, silence from public authorities.

Liquidation in early access

It is important to note that these planned layoffs are the “optimistic” scenario. It relies on the assumption that the company would survive the next few months.

For months, management at Don’t Nod have been giving out blurry, contradictory and fleeting information, to keep extracting as much work and motivation as possible from its workers. Even among the “Chiefs” and “Executive producers” the talking points were falsely encouraging and deliberately avoided talking about how layoffs would happen even with financial support. When worker representatives confronted and questioned them on the subject, everyone pretended not knowing about anything. We now have an answer…

It is difficult to predict exactly what will happen over the next weeks and months, because it is still highly unlikely that the company will find the financial support needed for its survival. We trust that Oskar Guilbert and its lackeys will keep taking, with all their incompetence, the most obnoxious decisions.