Et tu, ustwo?

30 Apr, 2026

A quite incredible interview with Ustwo Games CEO Maria Sayans

Speaking to Game Developer at London Games Fest a few months after the company said it would be pivoting away from mobile because the platform no longer offers a 'solid base to build a long-term business around," Sayans explains that call was made following a strategic review shortly before Netflix ditched Monument Valley 3.

It was a decision that forced Ustwo to bring the title to other platforms without publishing support from the streamer, and Sayans says it was already becoming clear that a lot of the deals that had allowed the studio to launch titles on mobile with backing from major companies like Netflix and Apple before targeting other platforms were no longer materializing.

When asked what sort of budgets Ustwo had previously been dealing with, Sayans reveals the studio has been making titles that cost between £7 million to £10 million with production cycles of between three to four years.

"We need to lower that," adds Sayans

For the quality of output - declining in quality and increasing in self-indulgence since Monument Valley - those figures and timelines are incredible.

According to Sayans, those ports didn't do "crazy numbers" but still managed to shift hundreds of thousands of units. It's a return she describes as a "decent."

I crunched those "crazy numbers" ¹:

The last two PC ports haven't shifted 75k copies between them!

Right now, Sayans explains Ustwo employs just under 30 people. At the peak of Monument Valley 3's development, the studio had around 40 workers. Rather candidly, she claims the studio has perhaps been a touch gung-ho when it comes to hiring full-timers.

"We've been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. 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," she continues.

"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."

Sayans notes that Ustwo titles are traditionally quite cheap despite costing a lot of money to make. Therein lies the balancing act.

It will be interesting to see what happens next. But I fear this will become an all-too-familiar story for legacy indie studios in the next 24 months.