Ustwo CEO says lower development costs are now paramount for studios

Maria Sayans was blunt about the new math for game studios: lower development costs are now paramount. For Ustwo Games, the Monument Valley maker is not treating that as a slogan. It is moving away from mobile, toward PC and console development, and building a leaner model around a core staff and more contractors.

That matters well beyond one London studio. Ustwo currently employs just under 30 people, down from a peak of around 40 during Monument Valley 3 production. Its games have typically cost about £7 million to £10 million each and taken three to four years to make. Sayans said the company’s pivot followed a strategic review shortly before Netflix dropped Monument Valley 3, after which Ustwo concluded that mobile no longer offered a solid base for a long-term business.

For mature studios, including Nintendo-facing teams that still have to ship with polish, the lesson is not to slash ambition. It is to attack waste before it hardens into schedule risk. The first place to cut is scope, not quality. Teams that know a project is heading toward a 3-year production cycle need clear guardrails on feature creep, platform sprawl and late design detours, because every extra system ripples through art, engineering, localization, QA and certification.

The second pressure point is staffing mix. Sayans said, “We'll have a core team and any growth will come through contractors.” That model is less romantic than the old idea of a large permanent team, but it gives studios room to add production muscle only where a project needs it. For Nintendo-aligned work, that can mean using external support for porting, cinematics, engineering spikes or content bursts while keeping the most identity-defining work in-house.

Tooling and asset reuse come next. A studio trying to protect margins cannot afford to rebuild every pipeline from scratch for each project, especially when moving from mobile to PC and console. Standardized tools, reusable UI systems, shared animation libraries and production templates reduce the hidden labor that accumulates in long development cycles. That is where quality-first cultures often save money without visibly trimming the game.

Platform planning is the last major lever. Ustwo’s shift to PC and console shows why studios are rethinking where a game will live before production ramps. Supporting too many platforms too late creates expensive testing, optimization and compliance work. Planning that earlier, and choosing the right launch path, can preserve the parts players actually notice: stability, performance and finish.

The wider signal is clear. In 2026, the studios that survive are not the ones spending the least. They are the ones that know exactly where to spend, where to reuse and where to let specialists carry the load.