Job Security Is 'Too Romantic,' Monument Valley Boss Says

£7 million to £10 million per game, with production cycles running three to four years. Those are the numbers Ustwo Games CEO María Sayans says the Monument Valley studio can no longer afford, and her proposed solution is one that should unsettle anyone trying to build a career in games: fewer full-time employees, more contractors.

"We've been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security," Sayans told Game Developer in an interview at London Games Fest. "I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that's something we're looking to change going forward."

Ustwo currently employs just under 30 people, down from roughly 40 at peak Monument Valley 3 development. Sayans acknowledged she isn't thrilled about the direction she's steering: "I think going forward, we'll see that we've got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I've been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability [...] but I think that's a shift in how we want to work with people going forward."

The context matters here. Monument Valley 3 launched in 2024 as a Netflix exclusive on mobile, only for Netflix to pull the game from its service six months later as the streaming giant overhauled its own gaming strategy. That forced Ustwo to bring the title to PC and consoles without publishing support. Sayans said the studio had already been finding that the kind of deals it previously struck with Netflix and Apple were "no longer materializing," prompting a pivot to becoming a PC-first studio. She pointed to London's cost of living and employee pensions as factors that make it harder for Ustwo to compete on budget with leaner PC developers elsewhere.

The Ukie Problem

What makes this more than one studio's belt-tightening is Sayans' other role. She chairs the board of UK games industry trade body Ukie, the organization that represents over 2,000 games businesses and 73,000 jobs across the UK. Ukie published an Employee Benefits Report in 2024 that talked about "creating benefits packages that not only retain talent but enrich working lives" and positioning the sector as a "benchmark for the wider creative industry." The person steering that body now openly describing worker stability as romantic idealism is a pretty stark contradiction.

I get that Sayans is being honest about the financial pressure, and I'd rather hear a CEO say "I hate this but it's where we're headed" than pretend everything is fine. But framing job security as something the industry needs to "abandon" rather than fight to preserve sends a message to every developer in the UK: don't expect permanence, even from the studios that used to pride themselves on it. When the person chairing your trade body says the quiet part out loud, it stops being one company's strategy and starts looking like an industry-wide concession.

Ustwo Games was previously accused of union busting by the UK's Independent Workers Union in 2019, an accusation the company denied at the time. The studio is now focused on bringing the Monument Valley IP to PC and consoles, with Sayans saying ports of titles like Monument Valley, Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, and Assemble with Care shifted hundreds of thousands of units on Steam and Switch, a return she described as "decent."