Storm Lancers and Ire: A Prologue developer ProbablyMonsters reportedly has laid off an unknown number of employees shortly before announcing its newest game Nekome: Nazi Hunter. The company appears to have laid off workers in two waves just weeks apart from each other.

The first round of layoffs took place in early January, with posts from one former Ire: A Prologue developer stating their team had been laid off. Then, in the last week, former QA employees posted that they had been laid off.

These layoffs follow our story from September 2025 about allegations of mismanagement and seemingly-strategic staggered layoffs at the company. Former workers told Game Developer that CEO Harold Ryan was at the center of the dysfunction, with the company repeatedly greenlighting new games and hiring developers, only to lay them off mere months later.

Earlier in the year, Ryan told Game Developer that the studio was on the path to sustainability after multiple reported rounds of layoffs. Former employees told us that the number of terminated workers was larger than previously publicly known, with many projects reportedly put on pause and staff members cut.

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Those who were not dismissed would be moved onto other projects, only to be laid off in the next wave. ProbablyMonsters also fired a global marketing manager for making jokes about the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Though ProbablyMonsters was founded in 2016 and raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the studio only managed to release two low-budget games in 2025. Ryan told Game Developer and other outlets that these were created with a deliberate new strategy to regularly turn out smaller projects to help fund larger games.

The development of Storm Lancers seems to contradict that plan. Sources told Game Developer that the game was indeed developed in around a year, but only because it was seemingly made with assets from a canceled live service third-person shooter codenamed "Project Vance." Sources told Game Developer that Project Vance had been in development at a subsidiary studio named Battle Barge, while Storm Lancers was primarily developed by UK outsourcing company Companion Group.

Concord developer Firewalk Studios also began life at ProbablyMonsters before being sold off to Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2023. Sony shut the studio down in 2024 after Concord debuted to dismal sales and poor critical reception.

It's unclear what state Concord was in when ProbablyMonsters sold Firewalk Studios to Sony. However after Concord shut down, Ryan told employees in a Slack message (viewed by Game Developer) that the development team "refused to listen for years."

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Game Developer has reached out to ProbablyMonsters for comment and will update this story when the company responds.