Iron Galaxy cuts up to 90 jobs in second major layoff round

Iron Galaxy is cutting up to 90 jobs, its second major layoff round in just over a year after it already reduced staff by 66 in 2025. The hit lands hard because Iron Galaxy has been one of the industry’s most visible support studios, the kind of company that quietly props up blockbuster releases while rarely getting the spotlight.

The Chicago-headquartered studio said on LinkedIn on April 17, 2026 that it was reducing company size and reorganizing as it adjusts to a slower-growth game market after the pandemic boom. The message framed the move as an apology to the people losing their jobs, but the business signal was louder than the sentiment: Iron Galaxy said it had become impossible to sustain the team size it carried over the past year, even after last year’s downsizing.

That makes this more than another grim layoff notice. Reporting around the studio’s latest cuts described Iron Galaxy as treating current market conditions as permanent, not as a temporary dip. For a company built on outside contracts and co-development work, that shift is existential. Work-for-hire studios live and die by publisher demand, and when budgets tighten, support teams are often the first to feel it.

Iron Galaxy’s credits show why the latest cuts resonate across the game industry. The studio, founded in 2008, says it has worked on dozens of games since then. Its name has appeared on projects tied to Destiny, BioShock, Fallout, The Lord of the Rings Online, Sleeping Dogs, the Batman: Arkham series, Apex Legends, and Overwatch. More recently, it helped with the PC versions of The Last of Us Part I and Part II and with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4. That mix of remasters, ports, and co-dev work is exactly the slice of the business now exposed to tighter spending and fewer guaranteed contracts.

The company’s own growth story makes the retrenchment starker. PocketGamer.biz previously reported that Iron Galaxy had more than 250 employees in March 2022 and had planned to add more than 100 staff for a third studio. One of the people publicly identified in the latest round was David Dague, known to many players as Bungie’s former community manager, Deej, who joined Iron Galaxy in 2020.

The broader industry backdrop is still ugly. GDC’s 2026 State of the Game Industry survey found that 28% of respondents worldwide and 33% in the United States had been laid off in the past two years, while half said their employer had carried out layoffs in the previous 12 months. Iron Galaxy’s cuts fit that pattern exactly: a veteran studio, a long resume, and still no shelter from a market that keeps shrinking the teams making the games players actually touch.