FuturLab lays off seven developers without warning team leads — staff asked to call those dismissed “leavers”

British studio FuturLab, known for PowerWash Simulator, has laid off seven employees after cancelling a project the team had spent two to three years developing. The cuts took place in July and came to light through the outlet This Week In Videogames, to which FuturLab CEO Kirsty Rigden confirmed the layoffs.

According to Rigden, the cancelled project was not related to PowerWash and was shut down at the pre-production stage: by the studio's calculations, development would have cost more than the game was capable of earning.

“It's awful, because these are very talented people, many of whom have been with us a long time, and I am genuinely grateful to them. The decision was neither easy nor quick, but by making hard decisions early we protect the future of FuturLab,” Rigden said.

Team leads learned about their people leaving after the fact

According to sources familiar with the situation, after the project was frozen in June 2026 the affected employees were left without tasks: no work was assigned to them for weeks. In July, seven of them were laid off, and the team leads, the sources claim, were not informed.

“Managers and team leads were not told that their direct reports would be absent, or why,” one of the outlet's interlocutors said.

FuturLab chief operating officer Chris Mehers reportedly confirmed the start of a restructuring at a meeting in August. At the next staff meeting, according to the sources, employees were asked not to use the word “layoff” in reference to colleagues and to call those dismissed “leavers”.

Replacing the formal term with a neutral word probably smooths over the picture inside the team, but leaves it without any understanding of exactly what procedure colleagues left under. Middle management loses part of its function in the process: a team lead who does not know that their team has shrunk can neither re-plan the work nor support people.

Why quiet layoffs have become the norm

The FuturLab story looks like a particular case of a broader process. The same day it emerged that France's Don't Nod is considering laying off 90 employees. Studios of different sizes and different specialisations are arriving at a similar decision: wind down new directions and concentrate on what already brings in money. For FuturLab that asset remains PowerWash — and the cancellation of a project unrelated to the series reads, in this logic, as giving up portfolio diversification in favour of a proven franchise.

The economics here are clear. Production costs have risen, the platforms are overcrowded, and money for long pre-production has become more expensive — studios that until recently could afford to explore a new idea in parallel are probably forced to close it earlier, before it turns into contractual obligations. The side effect is employees who sit on a frozen project for months and are the last to learn its fate.

If the trend holds, specialists should expect risk to be concentrated in quiet, targeted layoffs following cancelled projects — the kind the industry learns about from leaks rather than from official statements. For artists, animators and technical specialists this means a shorter planning horizon: work on a second, non-flagship project inside a successful studio has stopped being a reliable position. For the companies themselves the price of such an approach is also quite material — an employer's reputation in an industry where teams are assembled on recommendations from former colleagues.

What lies behind the project's closure: management miscalculations, a cooled-down market for casual simulators, the general contraction of the industry?