Monument Valley developer says studio was 'too romantic' about staffing as industry pressures mount

Ustwo Games CEO Maria Sayans has spoken candidly about the financial realities facing the Monument Valley studio, admitting the company may have been "a little bit too romantic" about maintaining full-time staff headcount. The comments, reported by Rock Paper Shotgun, come after a turbulent period that included Monument Valley 3 being pulled from Netflix last year.

Sayans, who also chairs UK games industry trade body Ukie, painted a stark picture of how the business landscape has shifted. "Those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good," she said, suggesting the conditions that allowed studios to grow and retain large permanent teams simply don't exist in the same way anymore.

Pivoting away from mobile and Netflix

The Netflix situation has clearly forced a strategic rethink at Ustwo. With Monument Valley 3 no longer tied to the streaming platform, the studio is now prioritising a PC-first approach - a significant shift for a series that built its reputation on mobile.

The original Monument Valley titles did eventually make the jump to PC, but only after establishing themselves on mobile first. Going PC-first with future projects represents a meaningful change in how Ustwo sees its audience and revenue streams.

A wider industry problem

Sayans' comments aren't happening in isolation. The broader games industry has been through a brutal stretch of layoffs and studio closures since 2023, with even major publishers cutting hundreds of staff at a time. Smaller independent studios like Ustwo face those same market pressures without the financial cushion that larger companies can lean on.

The acknowledgment that giving workers "full-time stability" is becoming harder to guarantee is a sobering one, particularly coming from someone at the centre of UK games industry advocacy. It signals that the conversation around sustainable employment models in games development - contract work, project-based hiring, smaller core teams - is becoming unavoidable even for studios with proven, beloved IP.

For fans of the series, the silver lining is that Monument Valley isn't going anywhere. But the path forward for Ustwo looks leaner and more cautious than the studio's earlier, arguably more optimistic years.