After Monument Valley 3 was unceremoniously pulled from Netflix last year, series developers Ustwo Games are now focusing on PC first and foremost. The first two entries in the series did also hit our game box shores, but only after their initial mobile releases.
This shift’s clearly forced Ustwo CEO and chair of the UK games industry trade body Ukie Maria Sayans to look long and hard at some numbers. Cue her concluding that the studio might have been “a little bit too romantic” about taking on full-time staff, rather than relying more heavily on contractors.
“We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security,” Sayans told Game Developer. “I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that’s something we’re looking to change going forward.”
If Sayans’ phasing there has raised your eyebrow, she went on to suggest this approach isn’t something she’s desperate to enact out of pure corporate evilness. “I think going forward, we’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry,” the exec added. “I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.”
She also argued that Ustwo being based in London and having employees with pensions factor into the studio being able to match the smaller budgets she claims some PC developers have found success with when taking punts on new games that don’t have established name value. It’s certainly not the hopeful message you might want to hear from the head of a body aiming to “shape a thriving, dynamic industry that leads globally and provides long-term opportunities for all involved”.
As of right now, Sayans cites Ustwo as employing just under 30 full-time staff, down from around 40 at the peak of Monument Valley 3’s development. Ustwo Games were accused of union busting by the UK’s Independent Workers Union in 2019, an accusation the company denied at the time.
