What the business is
A Bellevue, Wash.-based studio collective founded in 2016 by former Bungie CEO Harold Ryan, 'building a family of sustainable game studios through a people-first culture', with internal developers Battle Barge and Cauldron.
How it started
Harold Ryan, former CEO of Destiny-maker Bungie, founded ProbablyMonsters in 2016 to run studios as a family rather than as disposable startups, raising $200 million in 2021 and $50 million more in 2022.
What happened
April 2023: Firewalk, the collective's flagship internal studio, was sold to Sony. May 24: Firewalk revealed Concord, a multiplayer first-person shooter, at Sony's PlayStation Showcase. June: development on Cauldron's unnamed debut project was halted, Ryan saying on LinkedIn that its 'competitive landscape is too uncertain'. Battle Barge — staffed by veterans of Runic Games, Gearbox and Perfect World — continued on an unannounced project.
How it ended up
On September 15, 2023, Ryan announced layoffs of an undisclosed number of employees — eliminating 'some central services roles' while continuing 'hiring in critical areas'; posts suggested the live services team was hit. 'Our affected employees are not only great people: they are talented employees. If you have openings, I highly recommend each and every one of them,' he wrote.
What has to be true
Selling Firewalk to Sony removed the collective's most advanced studio — and the biggest consumer of shared central services.
Halting Cauldron's debut left the portfolio thinner than the overhead was built for.
The cuts targeted exactly the model's differentiator — central services — signaling the collective could not carry them at its reduced size.
Ryan's public recommendation of laid-off staff stayed consistent with the people-first brand even while shrinking it.
What can be applied
Shared central services only pay for themselves at scale: once a collective sells its flagship studio and shelves a project, the overhead that defined the model becomes the first thing cut.
Aftermath
As of September 18, 2023, ProbablyMonsters consisted of two internal developers — Battle Barge continuing its unannounced project, Cauldron without a greenlit debut — while Firewalk operated inside Sony preparing Concord for release.
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