Supermassive Games, the makers of The Dark Pictures Anthology games and the upcoming Little Nightmares III, has announced it is laying off up to 36 workers. This follows the 90 job cuts that the company made in 2024, which, at the time, was expected to be about 30% of its team. While this seems to be a sizable number of staff being let go, the studio says that this will not affect the development of Little Nightmares III, but the upcoming Directive 8020 game, a new entry in the Dark Pictures series, has been delayed to sometime in the first half of next year.
Directive 8020 Delayed Due to Layoffs
It is no surprise that the gaming industry is not in the strongest of positions at the moment. While the 36 layoffs with Supermassive doesn’t come anywhere close to the thousands recently let go from Xbox, this is still a pretty sizable axing for a studio that has had success in the past. Games like Until Dawn and The Quarry have been highly praised in the past, but the constant output of Dark Pictures games have been a little more hit-and-miss.
The big focus here will be how the cut in workforce affects Directive 8020. Originally, the game was set to release on October 2, just a week before Little Nightmares III. While we can fully understand wanting to spread the two games out to prevent any potential cannibalizing of sales from either side, we wonder if there is more at play here. There is a chance that Directive 8020 was delayed because it simply was not in the state they wanted the game to be in just a little over two months from release.
Currently, there are a few horror games that could seemingly come out around Directive 8020 in 2026. Resident Evil Requiem is set for February 27, and games like Alien Isolation 2 and Hellraiser: Revival don’t have release dates yet.
As for Little Nightmares III, from the wording in the post, it would appear that all (or at the very least, most) of the layoffs were people working on Directive 8020. The third entry, and first cooperative adventure for Little Nightmares, is still set to release on October 10. We previewed the game in 2024, and found it to be adorable, while at the same time terrifying.
