11 Bit Studios is laying off around 20 people while calling its finances stable

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11 Bit Studios is parting ways with around 20 employees, and the studio wants you to know the money is fine.

The Polish developer behind Frostpunk and The Alters confirmed the cuts in a statement to Game Developer, saying the changes were made to "align our team structures with current project phases." In a follow-up, a spokesperson said the company's financial situation is "stable" and that it is downsizing as it moves into a new production cycle.

"We need to adjust new project teams to current needs, manage our expenses carefully and maintain cost discipline," the spokesperson said.

That is the honest version of a thing studios usually dress up. Nobody is claiming a sales collapse forced this. Projects wrapped, new ones are at the concept stage, and the head count that made sense for the old phase does not make sense for the new one.

What the studio says happened to the people

11 Bit says most of the staff who were at risk got moved to other teams inside the company rather than out the door.

"Regarding the transfers and numbers, we managed to ensure internal transfers for most of our employees so they could continue their careers within the company. However, for the roles that, unfortunately, could not be carried over into new projects at their early stages, we had to make the difficult decision to part ways with around 20 employees."

Insider Gaming reported the same figure in June, citing sources close to the company, and put it at roughly 8% of a workforce that stood at 265 people as of December 2025. That report also said the cuts did not hit any of the studio's shipping projects.

This is the third round in three years

The pattern is what makes this worth writing down. 11 Bit quietly cut eight roles at the end of 2023. It cut staff again in December 2024 after killing Project 8, a console-focused game it had been building since 2018 and had spent 48.4 million PLN (about $11.8 million) on. The studio called 2025 a tough year even as Frostpunk 2 approached 600,000 sales.

None of that reads like a studio in trouble, exactly. It reads like a studio that keeps ending up with more people than its next slate needs, over and over, and treats the gap between projects as something to solve with headcount.

What's actually in the pipeline

Frostpunk: 1886 is the only announced 11 Bit game with a target year attached, 2027. Everything else is early. The Alters, which shipped in 2025 and got a sizable expansion this month, is the studio's other live property, and the Frostpunk series passed 11 million players by the company's own count roughly three months ago.

So: a studio with a hit franchise, eleven million players, a stable balance sheet, and 20 people looking for work anyway. That is not a scandal. It is just what the current shape of this business does to the people inside it, and it happens whether or not the games sell.