Don’t Nod Union: Company Driven Wall Years, Jobs Cut
French studio Don't Nod, maker of Life is Strange, has entered safeguard proceedings to stave off insolvency. A workers' union says the company was driven into…
French studio Don't Nod, creator of Life is Strange, has entered safeguard proceedings, and a workers' union says the company was driven into a wall for years. The procedure is a last-ditch restructuring effort meant to stave off insolvency.
The account comes from French union Le Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo, which published it on its website. Rock, Paper, Shotgun relayed it, and Eurogamer followed up. Eurogamer said it has asked Don't Nod for comment.
Most of the in-house team gone
The union report claims knowledge of a memo sent by Don't Nod CEO Oskar Guilbert, and of the workings of the employee representatives, known as the CSE. It says all of the studio's character artists, concept artists, most of its environment artists, most of its sound designers, game designers, level designers, programmers, producers, testers and dev-ops have been let go.
Don't Nod still intends to finish its in-development game, codenamed P14. The plan leans more heavily on outsourced development than on the cut-down in-house team. The union doubts the studio can pull it off.
"To compensate for this massacre and keep on running with production on a game that, to this day, didn't cut down on its scope and is keeping around a hundred persons busy, management is betting it all on outsourcing," the report says.
Managers, it adds, are kept on and expected to orchestrate the shift to outsourcing while absorbing the workload of fired colleagues.
Severance and health claims
The report also claims management cannot offer affected staff severance packages or redundancy plans. "It'll be the strict legal minimum and you'll be glad for it," it said. A voluntary redundancy scheme is reportedly not on offer either.
Then come the health allegations. "For two years, employees have been living on the edge, in uncertainty and anxiety, all of it reinforced by internal comms that alternated between inexistence and outright lies," the report said. It says the CSE documented six workplace accidents in 2026 and recently had to launch an inquiry into a serious and imminent danger.
"They do not care about the damage it deals to employees' health, they made no risk prevention plan," the report went on. It says employees feel like hostages to a radicalised management that is playing with the livelihood and future of 140 people.
A slide that began months ago
The news comes a month after the company's board voted to enter a period of restructuring that could lead to lay-offs for as many as 90 people. That followed only a few months after Don't Nod said it was close to running out of money.
Its most recent game, Aphelion, released in April, follows a duo's escape across a sci-fi world. It struggled to find an audience and received middling scores, according to Eurogamer. Lost Records, the 2025 Life is Strange follow-up, fared better and earned four out of five stars from Eurogamer, but its success was not enough to properly propel the studio.
The CSE negotiations are due to end on 3rd November, according to Eurogamer.
Source: eurogamer.net
