More sad news from the industry today as one of the leaders of the horror genre Supermassive Games has announced layoffs and a delay of its highly anticipated game Directive 8020.

The announcement, made on social media says the studio will have redundancies of approximately 36 employees. These redundancies are due to the ongoing challenges in the gaming industry.

“This decision was not taken lightly, and we know this will be an incredibly difficult time for everyone,” the statement reads. “Our absolute priority will be to offer full support to all those affected.” The post on social media says.

As part of the layoffs Supermassive has announced that Directive 8020, the first episode of Volume 2 of its Dark Pictures Anthology, has been delayed out of 2025 and will now release in the first half of 2026. No definitive date was given.

We last saw Directive 8020 back in June during the Future Games Showcase. There Supermassive showed a new trailer and the game was looking quite good already, so hopefully this is just a minor delay.

This is yet another sad day in the industry with layoffs. With the rising cost of development and longer development cycles it has put a lot of strain on the industry.

Little Nightmares III Not Affected

One piece of good news out of this, if there is such a thing, is that Supermassive’s upcoming game Little Nightmares III will not be affected by today’s layoffs. The third instalment of the popular series has a release date of October 10th for console and PC.

We wish those affected all the best and hope they land on their feet elsewhere quickly.