The Life is Strange studio had €8 million left at the end of July and has approved a plan that could cut up to 90 jobs in France.
Don't Nod told investors on Sunday there is material uncertainty over its ability to keep operating beyond 31 January 2027 unless it secures further external financing. The Paris studio behind Life is Strange had €8 million in gross cash at the end of July, down from €15.4 million at the close of 2025.
The warning arrived with the company's first-half results, reported by GamesIndustry.biz. Total operating revenue fell 56 percent year on year to €6.1 million, and the operating EBITDA loss widened to €4.3 million from €2 million in the same period last year. The board approved a restructuring plan on 4 September that refocuses the French business on a single production line and could cut up to 90 positions; talks with employee representatives have started. Game World Observer puts that at roughly half the current headcount, against about 320 staff in 2022.
None of this is sudden. Auditors flagged in June that the studio could run out of cash by November without new financing, after largest shareholder Tencent declined a short-term capital increase, and there was an earlier round of cuts in 2025. CEO Oskar Guilbert said the results "confirm the major challenges facing our industry".
The detail small teams should sit with is what happened to the two projects. Don't Nod said neither its sci-fi adventure Aphelion nor an unannounced project it calls P14 met the funding-capacity criteria it needed, despite expressions of interest. A studio of this size, with this catalogue, could not convert interest into signed money. Publisher enthusiasm is not a funding round, and a pitch that everyone likes is worth nothing until a contract is countersigned — that gap is where a runway disappears.
The one line of revenue that grew was work-for-hire: development revenue rose to €2.6 million, driven largely by a Montreal-made narrative game built on a Netflix property. Owning your IP is the better long-term position, and the studios currently paying salaries are the ones doing someone else's work.