Ustwo CEO Admits She “Hates” the Contractor Shift, but Calls Job Security the “Romantic” Idea the Monument Valley Studio Needs to Abandon

Mass layoffs have been, and will unfortunately likely continue to be an issue that plagues the video game industry in the short and long term. After the influx of investment that flooded the industry during the COVID-19 pandemic dried up, the thousands of layoffs we've seen over the last few years have decimated the video game industry and driven developers away from games due to the lack of job security. But, according to Maria Sayans, the chief executive officer of Ustwo Games, the team behind the Monument Valley games, job security is the price the industry needs to pay to lower development costs.

In an interview with Game Developer, Sayans discusses what it has been like for Ustwo Games to bring its popular puzzle series from mobile to PC and consoles, between the first two Monument Valley games arriving on PC in 2022 and the third game arriving last year.

Bringing the franchise to PC and consoles was a decision the studio made because, at least for Ustwo, mobile platforms had stopped providing a "solid base to build a long-term business around." But in its pivot to being a PC-focused company, Sayans says the studio uncovered what its biggest issue is, which is also likely what you'd hear every CEO of a game studio say their biggest problem is: development costs.

For Sayans, bringing down the cost of what it makes to develop a game, even when targeting platforms that are more viable like PC, is the most important thing for Ustwo Games to do. So much that it has Sayans rethinking seemingly basic elements of the industry, like workers' job security.

After admitting that Ustwo had been working with development costs between £7 million and £10 million per project, Sayans said "We need to lower that...There are people doing really, really well in those spaces on PC for much smaller budgets, that we will never be able to achieve because we're based in London and have employees with pensions and so on."

"We've been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security," Sayans said about Ustwo's current situation with a little less than 30 full-time employees. "I think that has 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."

"I think going forward, we'll see that we've got a core team and any growth will come through contractors," Sayans continued. "Which is something I hate about the industry. 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."

It's clear that studios need to find ways to bring down development costs. That's a huge element of what is driving the adoption of Generative AI in game development, and it's also what drove the thousands of layoffs we've seen and continue to see, impacting the industry constantly. But if studios hiring people only as contractors becomes the standard, it will likely only drive more people away from the video game industry to look for more sustainable work elsewhere.

A shift to contractors-first may be what works for a team like Ustwo, which has less than 30 developers, but it paints a scarier picture for the industry as a whole if more studios start to adopt that model. The lack of job security due to layoffs is what's driving the game industry's brain drain right now. Telling game devs that something as basic as being able to trust you'll have a job in six months is a "romantic" idea doesn't inspire confidence that the video game industry is where anyone should be trying to find a career.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.