Schell Games cuts staff for second time this year, hitting seven departments

Schell Games has announced its second round of layoffs in 2025, cutting what it called "a significant number of employees" across at least seven job functions — engineering, art and design, sound, marketing, IT support, research, and QA. The Pittsburgh-based VR developer did not disclose how many people are affected, and that omission matters for anyone tracking the games labour market: without a headcount, the true scale of the contraction remains invisible.

The studio announced the decision in a LinkedIn statement. "We're very sad to say that due to this challenging time in the game industry, Schell Games has found it necessary to lay off a significant number of employees in order to ensure a sustainable future for our studio," the company said.

It added: "While this will enable us to stay stable moving forward, it is incredibly painful as we are losing some fantastic talent."

Why the breadth of roles signals depth of the cuts

The affected functions span the entire production pipeline, not just one discipline. When layoffs reach engineering, art, design, sound, marketing, IT support, research and QA simultaneously, the reduction is structural rather than a targeted trim of a single team. For individual workers in VR development, the message is blunt: no specialism inside this studio was shielded, and the market for these skills in Pittsburgh's games sector has just tightened again.

The August round was the first staff reduction in the company's 23-year history — Schell Games was founded in 2002 and had never cut jobs before this year. Two rounds within roughly four months mark a sharp reversal for a studio that had positioned itself as a stability-first employer.

What the CEO said about layoffs — and what he did

CEO Jesse Schell has publicly advocated for avoiding layoffs. In a 2024 interview with GamesIndustry.biz, he said the key to avoiding them is to "prioritise stability."

"It's business. There are no guarantees. But it comes down to what you prioritise. If you prioritise stability, you can stay pretty stable, but you've got to give it a lot of time and thought and attention," Schell said at the time.

He was blunt about the industry's herd behaviour around cuts: "Layoffs are like an avalanche. If a company needs to do a layoff, it's a smart idea to do it when everybody else is doing it. Then it's like, Well, it's not us. That's just the economy right now. So if we're going to do it, we should do it now because then it's not going to make us look like something's wrong with us. It's going to make us look normal. So that's what we're going through right now. Hopefully, everything's going to normalise pretty soon."

A caveat belongs here. Schell framed timing as a reputational calculation, not a necessity in itself — yet the statement announcing these cuts cites a "challenging time in the game industry" as the cause. Both can be true; neither is verifiable without financials the company has not released.

Who is affected and what comes next

Schell Games is known for the VR puzzle franchise I Expect You To Die, for co-developing the VR adaptation of Among Us, and for building educational VR experiences. The studio says the layoffs will keep it "stable moving forward" — a promise that rests on numbers it has chosen not to publish.