Undead Labs Won't Say How Many Staff Its Layoffs Hit

Undead Labs, the Seattle studio behind State of Decay, has confirmed layoffs but refused to disclose how many employees lost their jobs — a rare break from standard practice in a games industry that has spent two years disclosing headcount cuts to the digit.

Studio head Philip Holt told GamesIndustry.biz he was "reluctant to share" the number of people affected. His reasoning, in his own words: "I would hate to reduce the impact to those individuals to a number or statistic."

That's a sentiment. It's not data. And for anyone tracking the games labor market, the gap matters.

What does the non-disclosure change?

When a studio reports a figure — say, 50 roles cut — outsiders can benchmark. Recruiters know how many candidates are entering the market. Departing employees can gauge whether their severance terms match peers. Competing studios can estimate where a team's capacity now stands.

Withholding the number removes all of that. The affected workers still exist. The market simply can't see them.

Holt's framing isn't unique, but it sits awkwardly against industry precedent. Across 2023 and 2024, major publishers and studios routinely confirmed layoff totals, and trade outlets including GamesIndustry.biz aggregated them. Transparency became the norm precisely because it helped displaced staff find their footing faster.

Refusing a count doesn't protect anyone from being "reduced to a statistic." It just makes the statistic invisible.

What it means for affected workers

If you were cut in this round, your leverage depends on documentation. Where a public figure exists, lawyers and recruiters can pattern-match severance offers against a known cohort. Where it doesn't, individual negotiation carries more weight — and more risk.

Practical read for practitioners:

• Treat the confirmation itself as the signal: a layoff happened, even without a headcount attached.
• Assume the cuts touched multiple disciplines, since the studio declined to scope them.
• Watch state WARN notices (the US legal requirement to report certain mass layoffs in advance), which often surface numbers employers decline to volunteer.

The bigger pattern

Undead Labs joins a long line of studios trimming headcount since early 2023, a stretch in which the games sector has shed thousands of roles worldwide. Each announcement has landed with a number attached. This one breaks that convention.

For labor-market watchers, the lesson is procedural. Confirmation of a layoff without a figure is still a data point — it tells you a studio is shrinking and doesn't want to say by how much. Absence of a number is itself information about how management wants the story told.

GamesIndustry.biz's report stands as the sole public account of the cuts so far, and Holt has offered no timeline for adding detail. Whether a WARN filing or follow-up disclosure fills the gap will determine if this round becomes countable — or stays a round number of zero.