11 Bit Studios is cutting 20 roles even as its Frostpunk franchise passes 11 million players and The Alters racks up sales that helped drive an 86 percent revenue jump in the first half of 2025. The Polish studio frames the move as routine alignment with early-stage project needs, insisting its finances remain stable while most affected staff get shuffled internally rather than shown the door.

This is not the studio's first round of shrinkage. It quietly let eight people go at the end of 2023, then shed an undisclosed number after canceling its console-focused Project 8 in late 2024. Frostpunk 2 itself sold nearly 600,000 copies after its September 2024 launch yet the company still described 2025 as a tough year. Now, with Frostpunk: 1886 slated for 2027 as the only announced title and other projects stuck in conceptualization, the pattern looks less like one-off restructuring and more like chronic under-scaling.

The statement about "cost discipline" and "new production cycles" reads like the same corporate memo circulating through dozens of other studios this year. Success on paper does not automatically translate to headcount security when pipelines stay thin and every new game starts from near-zero staffing. The 20 who could not be absorbed into those early teams are the ones left explaining the math to their families.