Coffee Stain Shuts Down Malmö Mobile Studio, Affecting 17 Employees

The studio that ported Goat Simulator 3 to mobile, published Songs of Conquest Mobile, and brought Smash Hit creator Mediocre under the Coffee Stain umbrella has gone dark. Coffee Stain closed its Malmö-based mobile development and publishing office, leaving all 17 of its employees facing an uncertain future.

Daniel Persson, Coffee Stain Publishing's Vice President of Mobile, broke the news on LinkedIn with a statement confirming his own position had been eliminated in the process. "Some personal news: Coffee Stain has decided to close our mobile development office in Malmö, and with that, my chapter leading this team comes to an end," Persson wrote. He also reflected that "building this office from the ground up has been one of the most rewarding experiences [in my career]."

Persson was the one who built the Malmö operation from scratch after joining Coffee Stain in 2020, bringing over a decade of mobile industry experience from King, Sybo, and Goodgame Studios with him. The studio was formally founded in 2021 and officially registered in February 2022, functioning as Coffee Stain's dedicated mobile arm for roughly three years. During that run, the team delivered Goat Simulator 3 to mobile in 2023, shipped Songs of Conquest Mobile, and absorbed Mediocre, the Swedish studio behind the massively downloaded physics game Smash Hit. Whether all 17 employees have been laid off outright or whether some may be absorbed into other parts of Coffee Stain Group has not been confirmed.

The closure lands at a complicated moment in Coffee Stain's corporate history. Coffee Stain Group only recently completed its separation from Embracer Group on December 11, 2025, and now trades independently on the Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market. That spin-off was one piece of Embracer's larger three-way breakup, which also produced board game giant Asmodee and Fellowship Entertainment, the rebranded entity that inherited what remained of Embracer after years of restructuring following a period of aggressive, unsustainable expansion.

The numbers around the wider industry make the Malmö closure feel less like an outlier and more like a symptom. Game developer layoffs hit approximately 14,600 in 2024, the peak of a multi-year surge that climbed from 8,500 in 2022 through 10,500 in 2023. A GDC 2025 survey of 3,000 developers found 41% had been personally affected by layoffs or watched their teams shrink, up from 35% the prior year, with 58% still bracing for more cuts to come. Behind each of those statistics are developers like the 17 in Malmö who built something real, then watched it close.