After 20 Job Cuts, Is Frostpunk: 1886 Still on Track?

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11 Bit Studios confirmed last week that it has laid off 20 employees as part of an internal restructuring plan. Based on the studio’s official headcount of 265 employees as of December 2025, that works out to roughly 8% of the company. More immediately, 11 Bit Studios has only one officially announced game on its release slate: Frostpunk: 1886, planned for 2027.

On the surface, it looks like another layoffs story. The details suggest something narrower: a studio reshaping its internal structure around its future release pipeline. 11 Bit Studios said that, as a company combining development and publishing, it wants to diversify project scale and development cycles while also pursuing near-term opportunities that make financial sense.

The bigger question is whether the cuts affect games already in production. According to a source familiar with the company’s plans, this round of restructuring has had no negative impact on any of 11 Bit Studios’ current projects. That matters because the studio’s public slate is still very thin, with Frostpunk: 1886 as the only clearly defined release on the books.

That said, there is a less reassuring side to this. Several other new 11 Bit Studios titles are still in the early concept and prototype stage. For anyone who follows studio slates closely, that means there are ideas in motion, but nothing concrete to track yet. For a studio known for high-concept, high-pressure survival games, that naturally raises expectations for whatever comes next, especially when the only firm date on the calendar is 2027.

In the broader industry context, the news is hardly unusual. By incomplete counts, more than 70 game development teams worldwide have faced some form of layoffs or closure since the start of this year, and 11 Bit Studios is another studio hit by that wave. The difference is that some teams go quiet after cuts. 11 Bit Studios, at minimum, still has at least one clearly defined release: Frostpunk: 1886, due no earlier than 2027.

The next thing to watch is 2 practical signals. First, whether the flow of new information on Frostpunk: 1886 starts to slow. Second, whether those 11 Bit Studios projects now sitting at the concept and prototype stage begin to take clearer shape over the next 1 to 2 years. If you are already waiting for the new game, there is no reason yet to write the game off. The smarter move is to keep watching for official gameplay footage, system details, and development updates. A studio going through restructuring is better judged by what keeps progressing than by what had to be cut.

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