Ninja Theory’s First Layoffs Land: Senua in Limbo and a Cold Winter for Mid-Sized Studios#

Hello everyone, Zhanlan Yingren here.

From the night of October 5 into the morning of October 6, my message feed lit up with LinkedIn screenshots — Ninja Theory employees posting their farewells. Some wrote long paragraphs thanking colleagues they had worked with for years; others left a single line: “this chapter may simply be over.” The first to spot the wave of posts was reporter Chris Kerr, who shared the screenshots on BlueSky, and Eurogamer ran a report the same day. By the time this piece was written, the shape of the story was clear: Ninja Theory, which until now had only been at the “closure proposal” stage, has started executing layoffs, and the first group of people is actually gone.

This is my third time writing about Ninja Theory on this site. The September 24 piece, Xbox’s Mass Layoffs and Reorg: Halo Goes to Activision, First-Party Studios Cut to Three, covered the macro picture — the Halo IP moving to Activision and the first-party studio map shrinking. The September 25 piece, Xbox Cuts Another 268 People, Ninja Theory Faces Closure, covered the start of closure consultations and the collapse of two sale agreements. In both, “closure” was still a carefully worded procedure — “proposed closure,” “under consultation.” This time, what I want to write about is different: the procedure is half finished, people are leaving, and the games hang in midair. What follows are the new facts at the execution layer: exactly who has left, where the studio stands now that both rescue deals have failed, the fate of Senua and Project Mara, and the same script playing out the same day at another UK studio, Supermassive Games.

1. October 5: Layoffs Went From “Proposal” to “People Are Gone”#

1.1 How the News Came Out#

The layoffs did not arrive as an official announcement; they surfaced layer by layer through employees’ farewell posts. On October 5, multiple Ninja Theory employees posted on LinkedIn in succession, confirming their departures or that their roles had entered redundancy consultation. Reporter Chris Kerr was the first to aggregate the posts on BlueSky, and Eurogamer followed up the same day. In other words, the outside world learned that “the first round of layoffs had landed” because the people leaving said so themselves.

That path says a lot in itself. As of publication, neither Xbox nor Ninja Theory has announced how many people are affected in total; the official position is still the September talking points. Matt Booty, Xbox’s studio chief (Xbox COO), had said previously: “Unfortunately, both of Ninja Theory’s independent agreements have fallen through. We will now enter consultation with employees on the proposed closure while continuing to explore other paths forward.” — “Closure” is still a proposal today, inside the UK’s statutory collective consultation process, not an officially confirmed permanent closure. Yet while that process grinds on, redundancy notices have already reached specific people.

1.2 The Seven Names Publicly Confirmed So Far#

Cross-referencing several outlets’ roundups, seven names among those publicly confirmed as departed or in redundancy process can be tied to specific roles:

That list deserves a second look. Among the seven names are two sound designers and two performance capture specialists, plus a technical director and a principal programmer — almost all of them are the kind of roles where the craft grows into specific works over a decade rooted at one studio. These are not generalists who can drop onto any project and start producing on day one, but people deeply meshed with Ninja Theory’s production pipeline, which is built on narrative, performance, and sound.

1.3 Two Farewells That Sit Heavy#

Katrin Mair’s farewell post included this passage:

“It is incredibly sad to know we will never finish the work we had in our hands. So much heart, talent, and effort went into it, and I truly wish we could have seen what it would ultimately become.”

The passage has been widely read as pointing at Senua — the third entry in the series, announced just this June at the Xbox Games Showcase and planned for 2027. A gameplay programmer who learns, mid-project, that it will most likely never ship in any form, and then has to pack up and leave. I have written in this industry for years, and this is the kind of line I dread reading most: not a single angry word in it, and yet after finishing it you sit there speechless for a long while.

Principal programmer Stefano Prosperi’s farewell was more direct:

“With Ninja Theory facing closure and all of us facing redundancy, it is hard to accept that this chapter may now be over.”

“This chapter may now be over” — from a principal programmer, that lands differently. Technical staff know better than anyone the invisible accumulation between a prototype and a finished game: in-house toolchains, pipelines tuned over years, lessons bought with past mistakes. None of that shows up on any acquisition checklist, and once the people leave, it dissipates.

1.4 The Unresolved Number#

To be clear: no party has announced the total number of people affected. Media coverage has consistently said “multiple” and “a group”; the seven names above are the only ones we can pin down, and clearly no studio happens to lose its technical director, principal programmer, and principal sound designer as the entirety of its layoffs. Until the UK’s statutory consultation concludes, a final official figure is unlikely to appear. So this article will not guess at a total — what can be confirmed is that execution has begun, and that is a fundamental difference from the “proposal” status of late September.

2. June to October: A Timeline That Kept Narrowing#

Lay the past four months out in a line and you get an abridged history of this industry’s contraction:

I still remember that June showcase. When the Senua trailer played, someone in our newsroom sighed that “the spiritual sequel to this series is finally here.” Who could have guessed that a week later the studio would be reported as facing closure — and that four months on, the trailer’s goosebump-inducing shots would be reported to have served another purpose entirely, which I will get to below.

One more detail worth recording: in the early discussions of this reorganization, many people assumed Ninja Theory would survive the “reshaping.” It had franchises, reputation, and a lean headcount by first-party standards. Four months later, it is the one that ended up in closure consultation. The survival heuristic collapses the moment it meets a cost spreadsheet.

As for the October 6 town hall — as scheduled, it lands right around when this article publishes. It may bring more details, or it may just be an internal alignment of talking points. I will be watching; if anything substantive happens, we will follow up on the site.

3. The Senua Trailer’s Other Audience#

3.1 One Trailer, Two Audiences#

According to Stephen Totilo’s report on his outlet Game File, the June reveal of the Senua trailer was itself a strategic move: Microsoft was already planning to divest Ninja Theory at the time, and one purpose of the trailer was to make the studio more attractive to potential buyers.

My first reaction to that report was hard to sum up as simple “anger.” Anyone who makes content knows what a trailer represents — every take on the performance capture stage, every sound the audio team tuned over and over, every concept frame the art department polished, all condensed into a little over two minutes that was supposed to be a letter to players. The report now tells us its first readers may not have been players at all, but the names on a buyer’s due diligence list. The work became a shop window, and the studio became an item on the shelf.

One layer deeper, there is a cruel loop here: Microsoft needed to prove the studio was “worth buying,” so it put the studio’s most anticipated work on stage; and the harder the work was showcased, the clearer it became how little the parent company wanted to keep it. When players cheered for Senua that day, they were applauding a team that was already being listed for sale.

3.2 Project Mara: Effectively Shelved#

Fading from view even earlier than Senua is Project Mara — the experimental psychological horror project pitched on “recreating, in real time, the sensory texture of a traumatic experience.” As relayed in Game File’s reporting, the project is now effectively shelved (the report’s own wording).

In the September 25 piece I wrote that the most valuable thing Ninja Theory owns is its methodology for narrative and psychological expression — the Hellblade series is that methodology made into a product. Project Mara was supposed to be the methodology’s next vessel; now it hangs in midair, along with the experimental directions it pointed toward.

3.3 Senua’s Fate: In Limbo, Not Canceled#

The wording has to be precise: as of publication, Xbox has not formally canceled Senua. There is no clear statement of what state the project is in under the official line. Katrin Mair’s farewell was widely read as pointing at the game because “we will never finish the work we had in our hands” is hard to read any other way — but it remains an employee’s personal statement, not a project status announcement.

So the only honest wording right now is: in limbo. Whether the specific content the studio was building will ever see the light is unknown. The planned 2027 release window still sits in every outlet’s database, but a team that has executed its first round of layoffs and sits inside closure consultation — who exactly finishes the game? That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the most concrete question of the next few months.

3.4 Two Rescue Deals: From “Terms Agreed” to Nothing#

One more detail from the September consultations. According to Chinese-language media, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma had said the studio had “agreed terms with a new owner and secured funding to finish Senua” — the original source and transcript of that remark could not be verified against a first-hand English source in our searches, so we record it as a secondhand account. What can be confirmed is the direction: as VGC verified, Microsoft had been actively seeking to sell Ninja Theory, with external buyers or private investment partners as the likely routes.

Then, in September, Matt Booty confirmed to staff: both independent agreements had fallen through. Who the buyers were, how much was on the table, why it failed — none of it was disclosed. What outsiders can see is only the outcome: a studio acquired by Microsoft in 2018, roughly 8 years ago, saw both talks collapse at the moment it came closest to “surviving,” and slid into closure consultation. The September 25 piece covered the full arc from acquisition to failed sale, so I will not repeat it here — just one personal note: the stretch of road between “terms agreed” and “deal done” is the thinnest page in a mid-sized studio’s book of life and death.

4. The Wider Picture: Xbox Gaming’s Three Rounds of Contraction#

Ninja Theory’s fall is not an isolated event; set it inside Xbox’s gaming division’s 2026 contraction and the pattern gets clearer:

My two previous pieces covered the Halo IP moving to Activision and the first-party map collapsing from 14 studios to 3; I will not repeat the macro ledger here. One thread relevant to this article: some argue Microsoft’s resource focus is shifting toward high-cost hardware projects like Xbox Helix — we published Xbox’s Full “Disc-to-Digital” Rollout: From Licensing Mechanics to the Helix Survey, a Final Projection for All-Digital Consoles on October 4, where the survey’s repeated questions about the optical drive make the all-digital direction of the next console increasingly explicit. Hardware projects need money, and content teams cost money — squeeze from both ends and the mid-sized teams built on creative strength become the first assets moved to the negotiating table.

If Ninja Theory’s closure goes through, the industry will naturally place it in the same sequence as the 2024 shutdowns of Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks — inside Microsoft’s portfolio, there is precedent for how “distinctive but not big enough” studios get handled. I expanded on that in the September 25 piece, so I will leave it there.

5. Another List the Same Week: Supermassive’s 70+#

5.1 Consultations End, 70+ Out the Door#

On the very same day Ninja Theory’s first layoffs landed — October 5 — Kotaku and Insider Gaming reported on another list: consultations at Guildford-based Supermassive Games, the studio behind Until Dawn and The Quarry, had ended with more than 70 people cut. Rewind to August 11, when the studio announced the consultation process: the projected ceiling was 75 people, and the official line called it “a necessary step to ensure the company’s sustainability.” Now the consultation has run its course and the blade has actually fallen, across development, art, production, QA, operations, and up into senior leadership.

Among the named departures, the one that left me speechless longest is Frank Tindle — former IT and facilities director. He joined in 2010, when he alone was the entire IT department; by the time he left, he had been at the studio for 16 years and was one of the veterans who watched Supermassive grow from a small group into a shop of more than 400 people. He was part of senior leadership, and his farewell post read:

“I’m not the only one leaving today — more than 70 brilliant people are leaving Supermassive.”

A veteran who once was the whole IT department, leaving as “one of more than 70 brilliant people.” The sentence has no ornamentation at all, and I think it is the heaviest line in all of today’s industry news.

5.2 A Third Straight Year: The Full Rhythm of Three Rounds#

Spread out Supermassive’s contractions and the rhythm is suffocating:

The three rounds add up to more than 200 people. Three years running, cuts every year. For a mid-sized studio built on ensemble-cast narrative horror, that pace means dismantling a piece of itself every year — until even a 16-year veteran who watched the company grow is on the list.

5.3 Directive 8020: The Axe Falls Less Than Six Months After Launch#

The timing of the third round is especially stark: it lands less than six months after the launch of Directive 8020, the Dark Pictures Anthology’s move into sci-fi. The game launched earlier in 2026 (around May by multiple outlets’ reckoning; an official exact date has not been confirmed) and was the studio’s bet on a new direction. The market’s response was split: the horror atmosphere had highlights, the script drew criticism, and online co-op was missing at launch — last week, the studio announced online multiplayer would arrive in October, about 5 months after launch. And CEO Robert Henrysson had already stepped down in June, just weeks after the game launched.

Read that sequence together: new CEO aside — launch, mixed reception, a promise to add content, the patch not yet live, layoffs executed. A game’s commercial life cycle had not even finished its first year, and the team that poured years into it had already lost more than a fifth of its people. This is not the failure of one game; it is the downstream effect of the whole production structure being squeezed.

5.4 The Sequel Changes Hands: Until Dawn’s Baton Passes On#

What stings series fans even more: Sony’s Until Dawn sequel is planned for 2027 — but it has been handed to PlayStation studio Firesprite, not Supermassive itself.

Remember, Until Dawn is the studio’s founding work and its most successful IP. The IP’s future now sits in someone else’s hands while the original creators have just cut more than 70 people. For the first time, a team’s core identity and its survival needs have been explicitly split apart. That stroke is colder than the layoff numbers themselves.

6. The Winter Facing Mid-Sized Creative Studios#

6.1 Two Paths, One Destination#

Set today’s two studios side by side and you see mid-sized teams being pushed toward the same place by two entirely different routes:

One is backed by a giant and failed to be sold even with careful handling; the other is independent and trims itself year after year without stopping the bleeding. The paths are opposites, but the destination is strikingly the same: mid-sized creative teams built on narrative, art, and sound have become the biggest casualties of this cost contraction.

6.2 Why They Always Get Hurt#

Both paths point to the same structural reality: the valuation logic for mid-sized creative studios is broken.

Inside a giant’s ecosystem, they are too small to dilute platform-level strategy costs yet too expensive to maintain compared with outsourced teams; as independents, they must shoulder the AAA cost curve alone, with development cycles and marketing spends far removed from the old low-cost, low-risk playbook. When the industry contracts overall, they have neither a parent platform to transfuse them nor a small team’s agility to pivot — being sold takes luck; slimming down takes time; and the market offers neither.

Today’s two lists add the latest and heaviest footnote to that judgment.

7. Closing: The Fate of Games and People#

And so we arrive at another ending. Three pieces into this series, I am increasingly convinced that the hardest part of this kind of reporting is not verifying the facts — it is facing the question of who these facts ultimately land on.

Alessio Mellina spent 12 years at Ninja Theory and led the construction of the binaural audio system that Hellblade’s whispers depend on. Anyone who played Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice remembers the experience — the whispers in Senua’s head coil in from every direction, near and far, keeping you on edge; with headphones on, that sound gliding along the rim of your ear is half of the game’s psychological pressure. That is not something a random audio outsourcing shop can produce; that is a craft polished for over a decade. Now the person who built that system has confirmed he is leaving. Katrin Mair said she hoped to one day see “what it would ultimately become” — she probably knows better than anyone that the answer may never come.

As the art editor of our newsroom, the performance capture thread weighs on me too. The pipeline Xoe Suvari and Rachel Kimber worked on is the direct source of the facial performances in Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 that players keep praising. Camera language can be learned, lighting setups can be copied, but the fraction of a second of truth an actor hands over in front of a lens needs a capture team that understands performance to catch it, layer by layer. Two names from that team appear on the layoff list, and the studio’s future state is unknown — the fate of that pipeline, like Senua itself, hangs in the air.

I have written in this industry for over a decade, I am used to the phrase “studio closure,” and I accept that commerce has its own cold logic. But when a list starts to fill with specific people — a gameplay programmer who wanted to see the work finished, a principal programmer who wrote “this chapter may now be over,” a 16-year veteran who went from being a one-person IT department to a director — the numbers stop being numbers. In the winter of mid-sized studios, the first things to freeze are always specific people, and the crafts they carry out the door are exactly what this industry can least afford to lose.

Three things to watch from here: whether the October 6 Xbox town hall reveals more details; when the third round of Xbox gaming layoffs lands; and whether Senua gets an official word of any kind — shelved, moved, or miraculously saved. If anything moves, we will keep writing.

— Zhanlan Yingren, NTGame Editorial

Appendix: Key Points At A Glance#

• On October 5, 2026, Ninja Theory’s first round of layoffs began to be executed, with multiple employees publicly confirming departures on LinkedIn; the story was first spotted by reporter Chris Kerr and reported by Eurogamer; neither Xbox nor the studio has announced a total headcount.
• Seven named employees are so far publicly confirmed as departed or in redundancy process: technical director Loong-Wei Ding, gameplay programmer Katrin Mair, technical sound designer Alessio Mellina (12 years; led the binaural audio system), performance capture specialist Xoe Suvari, performance capture technician Rachel Kimber (4 and a half years), principal sound designer Daniele Galante, and principal programmer Stefano Prosperi.
• Matt Booty’s official line: both independent agreements fell through; Xbox will consult employees on the proposed closure while continuing to explore other paths forward; “closure” remains inside the UK’s statutory consultation process and has not been formally confirmed as permanent.
• Per Game File, the June Showcase reveal of Senua was itself a strategic move: Microsoft was already planning to divest the studio, and one purpose of the trailer was to attract potential buyers; Project Mara is effectively shelved; Senua (2027, PC/Xbox/PS5) has not been officially canceled and hangs in limbo.
• Scale context: Xbox’s gaming division announced a 3,200-person reorganization in July (1,600 cut first), a second round of 268 in September, with the third round not yet executed.
• Same-day watch item: Supermassive Games’ consultations ended with 70+ people cut, spanning development, art, production, QA, operations, and senior leadership; former IT and facilities director Frank Tindle (a 16-year veteran) is among the named departures; three rounds (about 90 in Feb 2024, about 35 in July 2025, 70+ in Oct 2026) total 200+; Directive 8020 launched earlier in 2026 (around May per media) and was hit by layoffs less than six months later; the Until Dawn sequel (2027) has been handed to Firesprite rather than Supermassive.
• This piece is a sequel to our Ninja Theory series and is distinct from the September 24 macro reorg report and the September 25 closure consultation report: the first two covered the landscape and the procedure; this one covers the execution and the specific people.