When the CEO of a beloved indie studio publicly declares that job security and full-time employment are ideas the games industry has been "too romantic" about, it lands differently than your typical corporate restructuring memo. When that same CEO also chairs the UK's principal games trade body — an organization whose stated mission includes creating "long-term opportunities for all involved" — it lands like a grenade.
That's exactly the situation Maria Sayans, CEO of Ustwo Games, created at London Games Fest in late April 2026. Her candid remarks about the studio's shifting labor philosophy, reported by GamesIndustry.biz, ignited a fierce debate about what the games industry actually owes its workers — and whether the people at the top are the right ones to decide.
What Sayans Actually Said (And Why It Went Viral)
Speaking at London Games Fest, Sayans was direct about Ustwo's evolving approach to staffing. The quote that caught fire was characteristically blunt: the studio had been "a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security."
The statement isn't just a business pivot announcement. It's a philosophical position — one that frames the expectation of stable employment not as a reasonable worker demand but as a kind of sentimental excess, a luxury the industry can no longer sustain. The framing matters. There's a significant difference between saying "we can't afford to guarantee long-term employment right now" and suggesting that wanting job security in the first place is naive idealism.
Going forward, Ustwo plans to maintain a small core team and scale up through contractors for specific projects. The studio currently employs just under 30 full-time staff, already down from a peak of around 40 during the development of Monument Valley 3. Sayans also addressed game pricing strategy, recommending that studios launch at higher price points and discount later — noting that day-one fans are unlikely to be deterred by the difference between £5 and £10.
The Netflix Factor: How Monument Valley 3's Exit Changed Everything
To understand Sayans' pivot, you need to understand what happened with Monument Valley 3 — and how abruptly the rug was pulled out from under Ustwo's strategy.
The game launched exclusively on Netflix's gaming platform, which seemed like a smart move at the time. Netflix was aggressively investing in games, offering studios a well-resourced partner and a massive built-in audience. But approximately six months after launch, Netflix removed Monument Valley 3 from its platform. The game that had consumed years of development, cost between £7 million and £10 million to produce, and required a team that peaked at around 40 people — gone from its exclusive home within half a year.
The fallout was immediate and structural. Ustwo shed roughly a quarter of its workforce as headcount dropped from ~40 to under 30. And Sayans began publicly rethinking every assumption the studio had operated on.
That rethinking includes a fundamental platform shift. As reported by Rock Paper Shotgun, Sayans says mobile no longer offers "a solid base to build a long-term business around" — a striking admission from a studio that built its reputation and fortune on mobile gaming. Ustwo is now pivoting to PC-first development, entering a market with very different economics, much stiffer competition, and an audience that has historically been skeptical of mobile-adjacent studios.
The Budget Problem and the Contractor Solution
Sayans' comments also illuminate a genuine tension that many mid-tier studios face: how do you make games that cost £7–10 million and take 3–4 years to develop in a market where a 15-person team can produce a breakout hit for a fraction of that?
Her answer is to lower both the budget and the fixed cost base. Previous production cycles at those price points required a staffed-up studio with full-time salaries, benefits, and the overhead that comes with running an organization in London — one of the most expensive cities in the world. Sayans specifically cited London operating costs and employee pension contributions as factors making it difficult to compete with leaner studios operating elsewhere.
The contractor-heavy model Sayans is proposing offers a way around this: keep a small permanent core, bring in specialists for specific phases of production, then release them when the work is done. It's a model that's common in film, architecture, and other project-based creative industries. It's also a model that transfers virtually all employment risk from the company to the individual worker.
The economics aren't irrational. But the framing — that the desire for stable employment is a kind of romantic fantasy rather than a legitimate expectation — reveals something about how some industry leaders conceptualize their relationship with the people who make their products.
The Ukie Contradiction: Championing an Industry You're Reshaping
The detail that turned Sayans' comments from industry news into a broader controversy is her dual role. She isn't just a studio CEO managing a difficult restructuring — she's the chair of Ukie, the UK games industry trade body.
Ukie's stated mission includes advocating for the games industry and creating long-term opportunities for everyone involved in it. That makes Sayans' public comments about job security being "too romantic" something more than a private business decision. She's arguably the most prominent official voice of the UK games industry, and she used that platform — or at least the same press circuit — to articulate a vision of game development where permanent employment is a quaint ideal rather than an achievable standard.
The optics are genuinely difficult to defend. Trade bodies exist, in part, to push back against the kind of labor instability that contractor-heavy models normalize. When the chair of such a body advocates publicly for that model, it raises legitimate questions about whose interests the organization is actually representing.
A Pattern, Not an Incident: Ustwo's Labor History
This isn't the first time Ustwo's relationship with labor has attracted scrutiny. In 2019, the UK's Independent Workers Union accused Ustwo Games of union busting — an accusation the company denied. The details of that dispute have faded somewhat from public attention, but the accusation established a context that makes Sayans' 2026 comments feel like part of a pattern rather than an isolated incident.
Together, these episodes sketch a studio that has repeatedly found itself on the friction-heavy side of worker-employer relations — even as it maintains a public profile as a thoughtful, values-driven independent developer. The Monument Valley game series is practically synonymous with beauty, craft, and intentionality. The studio that made it has a more complicated relationship with the people who built those experiences.
What This Means for the Broader Industry
Sayans' comments went viral not because Ustwo is uniquely bad, but because she said out loud what many studio executives practice quietly. The games industry has been shedding jobs at an alarming rate since 2023. Major studios — including some of the biggest names in the business — have conducted mass layoffs while simultaneously reporting record revenues. The contractor model has been expanding for years across mid-tier and indie studios alike.
What Sayans did was strip away the euphemistic language that usually accompanies these decisions. There were no references to "right-sizing" or "strategic realignment." She called job security a romantic ideal and moved on. The response she received suggests that a significant portion of the games industry — particularly workers — found that framing more revealing than she may have intended.
The PC pivot Ustwo is making also deserves scrutiny on its own terms. The PC market offers higher price ceilings and a more engaged audience, but it's extraordinarily crowded. The studios that win on PC typically do so through either massive production scale, deeply distinctive design, or extraordinarily efficient development. Whether Ustwo — a studio built around mobile aesthetics and a specific kind of puzzle-game sensibility — can translate that into PC success is an open question. The answer will depend partly on the games they make, and partly on whether a contractor-assembled team can maintain the creative coherence that made the original Monument Valley games feel like complete artistic statements.
"Those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good." — Maria Sayans, acknowledging the generational shift in games industry working conditions
That quote, perhaps more than any other from the interview, captures the genuine complexity of the situation. Sayans isn't wrong that the economics have changed. She's also the person responsible for deciding how those changed economics get distributed between capital and labor — and her public statements suggest she's made that call in a particular direction.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did the Ustwo Games CEO say about employment?
Maria Sayans, CEO of Ustwo Games, said the studio had been "a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security." She made the comments at London Games Fest in late April 2026, in an interview with Game Developer. The remarks outlined Ustwo's plan to maintain a smaller permanent core team while scaling up through contractors for specific projects.
Why did Ustwo Games change its strategy?
The strategic pivot was triggered primarily by Netflix removing Monument Valley 3 from its platform approximately six months after the game's exclusive launch there. The removal forced the studio to rethink its platform strategy, budget model, and approach to staffing. Sayans also concluded that mobile gaming no longer offers a viable long-term business foundation, prompting the shift to PC-first development.
How many people does Ustwo Games employ?
As of the time of Sayans' comments, Ustwo employed just under 30 full-time staff. This represents a reduction from the peak of approximately 40 people on the team during Monument Valley 3 development. Going forward, the studio plans to keep a small permanent core and hire contractors for project-specific needs.
What is Ukie and why does Maria Sayans' role there matter?
Ukie is the UK games industry's principal trade body. Its stated mission includes advocating for the industry and creating long-term opportunities for everyone involved. Sayans serves as Ukie's chair, making her the most prominent official representative of the UK games sector. Critics argue there's a contradiction between chairing a body meant to support industry workers and publicly advocating for a hiring model that reduces employment security for those same workers.
Has Ustwo Games had labor controversies before?
Yes. In 2019, the UK's Independent Workers Union accused Ustwo Games of union busting. The company denied the accusation. The 2026 comments about job security being "too romantic" have led some observers to revisit that history and view both incidents as part of a broader pattern in the studio's approach to labor relations.
The Bottom Line
Ustwo Games is navigating a genuinely difficult set of circumstances: a platform partner that pulled the rug out, a mobile market in structural decline, and production economics that are increasingly hard to sustain at the mid-tier. None of that is in dispute.
What is in dispute is the framing. Describing the desire for stable employment as "too romantic" isn't a neutral economic observation — it's a value judgment that places the burden of industry instability squarely on workers who had reasonable expectations of the jobs they signed up for. Coming from the chair of an industry trade body, it also shapes how those institutions think about their advocacy priorities.
The games industry's labor crisis is real, ongoing, and getting worse. What it needs from people in Sayans' position isn't validation that job insecurity is just the new normal — it's honest engagement with whether the current model is sustainable and who should bear the cost of fixing it. The answer to that question will determine what kind of industry game development becomes over the next decade, and whether the people who love making games can still afford to do so.
