Mighty Coconut, the indie studio behind Walkabout Mini Golf (2020), announced it’s reduced headcount by 25% n addition to raising future DLC prices to offset costs.
Might Coconut founder Lucas Martell published a blogpost explaining some of the difficulties the studio is facing amid the backdrop of an admittedly “challenging” VR game development landscape.
After staff reductions, which has affected a quarter of the studio, Martell says the remaining team at Mighty Coconut is now 27—something he says will let the studio “continue expanding the game for the foreseeable future.”
Walkabout Mini Golf fans have come to expect a steady stream of new course DLC, which thankfully isn’t set to change. Martell says that instead of the typical seven annual courses, the studio is set to deliver an expected six.
What is changing though—starting with the next release—is that DLC prices will raised by $1, bringing new courses from $4 to the new price of $5.
“We feel that’s the most direct way to support development as DLCs have grown in complexity. All previously released courses will stay at their current prices,” Martell says.
The studio is also focusing more on the VR version—available on Quest, SteamVR, PSVR 2, and Pico—and less on the ‘Pocket Edition’ for iOS.
“While we want to support as many platforms and ways to play as possible, keeping a completely unique mobile version of the game in lockstep with the VR platforms is a monumental task that slows down production much more than we had anticipated,” Martell explains. “We’d like to keep crossplay between VR and mobile functional for as long as we can, but we will also be sunsetting that at some point. We will be sure to announce that in advance once we do.”
Additionally, Mighty Coconut is scaling back development of additional activities, like Employee Mode, Chess and Slingshots.
“We know how popular these are and hope to return to them soon, but they require a fair bit of energy that needs to be focused elsewhere at the moment,” Martell says.
Mighty Coconut isn’t the only studio feeling the pressure. The wider industry recently saw a number of VR studio closures, reductions, and cancelled projects.
Fellow XR indie Cloudhead Games (Pistol Whip) also recently experienced layoffs affecting 70% of staff, while Meta’s XR Reality Labs division saw a reported 10 percent staff layoff. This includes the closure of Sanzaru Games (Asgard’s Wrath), Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR port) and Twisted Pixel (Deadpool VR).
Additionally, budget cuts reportedly also saw the cancellation of a Harry Potter VR game for Quest, which was supposedly being developed by Skydance Games. Due to the Sanzaru closure, a Batman: Arkham Shadows sequel was also consequently cancelled.
