Mighty Coconut, indie studio behind hit VR game Walkabout Mini Golf (2020), announced another round of layoffs affecting ~35% of staff.
“This is an incredibly hard message to write, but I want to continue to be transparent with the Walkabout community,” writes Mighty Coconut CEO Lucas Martell in a company blog post. “Due to the current state of the games industry and especially VR, Mighty Coconut will need to downsize, and over the next several months we will be saying goodbye to 10 talented people who have helped make Walkabout what it is.”
This follows a round of layoffs in January that affected 25% of the studio, effectively reducing Mighty Coconut to just 27 at the time, also coming alongside a DLC price hike that raised all forthcoming DLC by $1, with new courses moving from $4 to $5.
“While we already downsized last January, I failed to anticipate just how rapidly and deeply this trajectory would continue,” Martell continues. “The amazing courses and worlds created by our talented team have allowed us to fare better than many studios who have had to close completely, but without a steady stream of new players coming into VR and Walkabout, the scale at which we’ve been operating is no longer sustainable.”
Martell maintains that “Walkabout isn’t going anywhere,” as the studio promises to continue its steady release of DLC courses, albeit “a little less often due to the reduced team size that returns us to the small and scrappy way we started.”
Martell says that in the meantime, the studio is diversifying revenue with continued work on Walkabout Dungeon Golfer, an upcoming hybrid VR/flatscreen roguelike dungeon crawler featuring golf mechanics, and GRASS, a flatscreen co-op lawn-care simulator.
“While incredibly painful, this is the only course of action that allows us to keep the game alive, the servers active, and hold on to as much of our team as possible,” Martell maintains.
Mighty Coconut is far from the only studio currently under pressure from a contracting VR games industry; this year alone has seen a number of VR studio closures, reductions, and cancelled projects.
Meta’s XR Reality Labs division saw a reported 10 percent staff layoff earlier this year, which included the closure of Sanzaru Games (Asgard’s Wrath), Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR port) and Twisted Pixel (Deadpool VR).
Industry wide budget cuts also reportedly saw the cancellation of a Harry Potter VR game for Quest from Skydance Games, Batman: Arkham Shadows sequel from Sanzaru, and a “major project” from Moss developer Polyarc, which announced last month it was shuttering the studio as a result.
