Supermassive Games is cutting more than 70 roles in 2026, according to a report picked up by industry tracker Shattered.io.

The British horror studio behind the Until Dawn and Dark Pictures franchises confirmed the layoffs internally. No project cancellations have been disclosed publicly. The scale puts the move among the larger UK layoffs of the year.

Hours later, a second alarm sounded across European studios.

What is Warhorse warning about?

Warhorse Studios, the Czech developer behind Kingdom Come: Deliverance, separately warned of a wider talent "exodus." The phrasing matters. An exodus describes movement, not a single layoff event. It implies developers walking out the door toward other employers, often across borders.

One studio is shrinking from within. The other is bleeding staff to the outside.

Why does this matter now?

Two mid-sized European studios rarely break news on the same day. Both sit in the AA bracket, the band between indie teams and the multi-thousand-headcount giants. That middle tier employs a large slice of Europe's professional game developers, and it rarely makes headlines.

When two of them signal distress together, peer studios take notice.

What changes for the people inside these studios?

The Supermassive cuts remove 70-plus roles from a single payroll. For a mid-sized studio, that lands somewhere near one in every eight or nine jobs gone in a single announcement. Warhorse's warning is harder to quantify, but a sustained talent drain hits production schedules first and morale second.

For both studios, the practical question is identical: who finishes the next project on time?

What changes for the wider business?

Mid-tier studios balance original IP against publisher work-for-hire deals. Losing a tenth of headcount shrinks the studio's capacity to pitch new work. Losing senior staff to foreign competitors erodes the institutional knowledge that defines a studio's voice.

Neither studio has named which teams are affected. Neither has disclosed severance terms. Neither has signaled whether further cuts are coming.

What to watch next

The next signal worth tracking is a number from Warhorse. The studio has used the word "exodus" but has not attached a figure in public reporting so far. A concrete headcount would convert a warning into a market signal that publishers and rival employers can act on.

Watch also for any parent-company earnings filing that touches either studio. Watch for peer studios in Prague, Brighton, or Guildford to echo the same language in the weeks ahead. The hardest fact still missing from this story is whether two simultaneous distress calls mark one bad week or a structural shift in how Europe's mid-tier development is funded and staffed.