There’s deep unrest at French studio Don’t Nod – creator of Life is Strange, Remember Me, Vampyr, Banishers: New Eden, and most recently Aphelion – as it scrambles to restructure itself and guard against insolvency.
Indeed, an impassioned account of proceedings on French union Le Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo’s website (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun) reveals Don’t Nod has entered safeguard proceedings – a kind of last-ditch restructuring effort to stave off insolvency. It also reports that even though redundancies are being made,Don’t Nod intends to finish making the in-development game codenamed P14, albeit relying more on outsourced development rather than its cut-down in-house team.
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The report, which claims knowledge of a memo sent by Don’t Nod CEO Oskar Guilbert, and of the goings-on of the Don’t Nod employee representatives – the CSE – doubts whether Don’t Nod will be able to finish the game. Apparently all of the studio’s character artists, concept artists, most of its environment artists, most of its sound designers, game designers, level designers, programmers, producers, testers, and dev-ops have been let go.
“To compensate for this massacre and keep on running with production on a game that, to this day, didn’t cut down on its scope and is keeping around a hundred persons busy, management is betting it all on outsourcing,” the report says.
“Managers, who are usually seen as more competent and experienced than non-managers, are kept within the organisation and studio management expects them to orchestrate the massive shift to outsourcing as well as take over the workload of the fired team members. Anyone with a little experience with video games production and sanity understands how out-of-touch such a plan is.”
The report also claims Don’t Nod management isn’t able to offer affected staff severance packages or redundancy plans. “It’ll be the strict legal minimum and you’ll be glad for it,” the report said. A voluntary redundancy scheme also isn’t reportedly being offered.
“This company has been driven into a wall for years, against all outsider wisdom, against any sort of reality-based assessment,” the report went on. “For two years, employees have been living on the edge, in uncertainty and anxiety, all of it reinforced by internal comms that alternated between inexistence and outright lies. This impacted their health, as evidenced by the CSE who documented six workplace accidents in 2026 and recently had to launch an inquiry into a serious and imminent danger.
“They do not care about the damage it deals to employees’ health, they made no risk prevention plan. Employees feel like hostages to a radicalised management, who keep playing with the livelihood and the future of 140 people with no care for the consequences of their actions.”
The CSE negotiations apparently end on 3rd November. We’ve asked Don’t Nod for a comment.
News of Don’t Nod’s slide towards the brink of insolvency comes a month after the company’s board voted to enter a period of restructuring – of transformation – that could lead to lay-offs for as many as 90 people. That in turn came only a few months after Don’t Nod said it was close to running out of money.
The company’s most recent game, Aphelion (released in April) – which charted a duo’s escape across a sci-fi world – struggled to find an audience. We didn’t review it on Eurogamer but a brief look around shows it only received middling scores. 2025’s Life is Strange follow-up Lost Records fared better – we awarded it four out of five stars – but its success wasn’t enough to properly propel the studio.
