A $100M Studio Cuts Staff Before Its Game Ships

Fourteen Names, No Studio Statement

Reports of layoffs at That's No Moon began circulating on 7 August 2026, when current and former staff started posting about job losses on LinkedIn. Game Developer, citing posts from an associate environment artist and a producer at the studio, and Insider Gaming, citing a former employee directly, both put the number at 14 people, spread across environment art, technical art, concept art and production. One affected environment artist wrote that the layoffs hit during their first job in the games industry; a producer posted a tribute to former colleagues rather than any explanation of the cuts.

As of the most recent reporting, That's No Moon has not issued a public statement confirming the layoffs, naming a cause, or addressing whether Crossfire's development timeline is affected. Game Developer said it contacted the studio for comment and did not receive one before publishing.

A New Chapter in a 670-Million-User Franchise

That's No Moon is not an unknown studio betting on an unproven idea. It was founded in Los Angeles in August 2021 with a confirmed $100 million investment from Smilegate Entertainment, according to a press release from law firm DLA Piper, which advised on the deal. Smilegate is described in that same release as the South Korean company behind Crossfire, a first-person shooter franchise with more than 670 million registered users worldwide, one of the best-known Asian game franchises never to have had a major Western release under That's No Moon's stewardship. The studio's founders and staff came from Naughty Dog, Infinity Ward, Sony and Activision, giving it a level of pedigree and up-front capital that few new studios ever secure.

The layoffs, in other words, did not hit a scrappy startup burning through a seed round. They hit a studio five years into a nine-figure investment, working on the next entry in one of the highest-registered-user franchises in gaming.

A Reveal With No Release Date

That's No Moon showed Crossfire publicly for the first time at Summer Game Fest in June 2026, presenting a new Adaptive Cover gameplay system built around the shooter's core combat. The reveal generated positive attention within the games press, but the studio did not attach a release date or launch window to the announcement, and none has followed in the two months since. That absence of a release date matters here: layoffs at a studio with a game already on shelves can be read against real sales numbers, refund rates or player counts. Layoffs at a studio whose only public output is a gameplay reveal trailer cannot be tied to any of that, because none of it exists yet.

That gap between a reveal video and a real product is also where the layoffs land hardest for outside observers trying to understand them: there is no earnings call, no post-launch retention chart, no refund wave to point to as a cause.

What Makes This Layoff Different

Most of the games industry layoffs that made headlines through 2026, at companies like EA, Ubisoft, Bandai Namco and Supermassive Games, followed a visible financial trigger: a shipped title underperforming, a quarterly earnings warning, or a public restructuring tied to a parent company's cost targets. Each of those cuts came with a number attached, whether it was a sales miss, a loss on the balance sheet, or a formal statement about headcount targets.

That's No Moon's cuts have none of that. There is no shipped Crossfire to have underperformed, no earnings call flagging a miss, and no public statement connecting the layoffs to a specific financial trigger. The studio's $100 million backing from Smilegate was never in question, and the game's public reception in June was, by the coverage available, positive rather than negative.

Beyond the Headline: When Funding Stops Being a Shield

The pattern in 2026's other games layoffs was legible even to a casual reader: a game underperforms, a publisher cuts the team that made it. That's No Moon breaks that pattern. Here is a studio sitting on a confirmed nine-figure investment, staffed by veterans of some of the industry's most successful franchises, working on a sequel to a game with over 670 million registered users, cutting art and production staff before a single unit has sold and before a single earnings call has happened.

That is worth reading as a signal in its own right. If funding security and franchise pedigree no longer protect a production team from mid-development cuts, the cost discipline sweeping the games industry through 2026 has stopped being a response to specific failures and has become a default operating posture, applied even to the projects publishers have the least financial reason to worry about.

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