Just Bought a Studio? Behaviour Lays Off Staff Again

Weeks after announcing it had acquired The Fun Pimps, the studio behind 7 Days to Die, Behaviour Interactive has laid off another round of employees. The exact number of affected workers hasn't been confirmed, but at least one senior member of the Dead by Daylight team has publicly confirmed their departure.

Jonathan Veiga, a senior animator who worked on Dead by Daylight, posted on social media that he was caught in the cuts. "Welp.. Unfortunately, I was affected by the layoffs from Behaviour," Veiga wrote. "I honestly didn't think it was going to happen to me." He noted he's still working on Rivals of Aether and asked anyone looking for an animator to reach out. Eurogamer reported on the layoffs and has contacted Behaviour for comment, though no official response has been given yet.

The timing here is hard to ignore. Behaviour just bought a studio. It also has Serious Sam: Shatterverse in the pipeline, which was revealed during a recent Xbox Partner Showcase. Dead by Daylight itself is far from winding down; the game has a major Attack on Titan crossover event launching on April 28, bringing back the popular 2v8 mode alongside new cosmetics. This is not a company that looks like it's contracting. It looks like one that's spending in some places and cutting in others, and the people getting cut are the ones actually making the games.

A Pattern, Not an Incident

This isn't Behaviour's first round of layoffs, and it isn't even close to the first in recent memory. The studio cut up to 95 employees in June 2024, citing a need to "focus on its historical strengths." Before that, there was another wave in January 2024. So this is the third round of cuts in roughly two years, all while the company has continued to expand through acquisitions and new project announcements.

I find it difficult to square those two realities. If you have the budget to buy another developer, you presumably have the budget to keep your senior animators employed. Acquisitions aren't cheap. Neither is launching a new IP under the Serious Sam banner. The money is clearly there; it's just not going to the people who were building Dead by Daylight day to day. That contradiction is the story, and it's one that keeps repeating across the industry: studios announce flashy new deals and expansions while quietly gutting the teams that built their flagship products.

Behaviour hasn't commented publicly on the scope of these layoffs or the reasoning behind them. Given the company's track record, I wouldn't expect much detail even when a statement does arrive. The June 2024 cuts got a vague press release about refocusing; there's no reason to expect anything more specific this time.

Dead by Daylight currently holds a 71 on OpenCritic and remains one of the most consistently updated live-service games on the market, available across PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Switch, and PC. Its next major content drop, the returning Attack on Titan collaboration with new skins from Kodansha's manga series, runs from April 28 through May 19.