Two weeks after Xbox confirmed it was moving toward closing Ninja Theory, the Hellblade studio has started actually letting people go. Multiple employees posted on LinkedIn on October 5 saying they’d been made redundant or were entering their final days at the Cambridge, England studio, turning a projected closure into a real one with names attached.

Who’s affected, in their own words

The departures so far include principal sound designer Daniele Galante, character artist Pietro Berto, technical artist Justin Pedersen, sound designer Matteo Tummino, performance-capture technician Rachel Kimber, technical sound designer Alessio Mellina, senior technical artist Matt Le-Fevre, technical director Loong-Wei Ding, and gameplay programmer Katrin Mair — a cross-section of the team that would have built Ninja Theory’s next game.

Mair’s post captured the mood across the studio, saying it was “incredibly sad” knowing the team wouldn’t get to finish what they were working on, and that she wished they’d had the chance to see what it could have become. Kimber, reflecting on four and a half years at the studio, called it “some of the best years of my life” while saying goodbye to coworkers she now considers friends for life.

How a “proposed closure” became an actual one

This is the next chapter of a story we’ve been tracking since July, when Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s restructuring memo put Ninja Theory and three other studios up for sale rather than closing them outright. Xbox said at the time that Ninja Theory had “entered terms” with a prospective buyer. That didn’t hold: on September 22, Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty confirmed both attempts to find Ninja Theory a new owner had fallen through, and the studio entered a UK-mandated redundancy consultation — a process that, under British employment law, must run at least 30 days before layoffs affecting 20 or more staff can be finalized. October 5’s wave of departures is that consultation period playing out in public, roughly two weeks after it began.

Ninja Theory has a longer history than this restructuring alone. The studio was founded in Cambridge in March 2000 as Just Add Monsters by Tameem Antoniades, Nina Kristensen, and Mike Ball, renamed Ninja Theory in 2004, and built its reputation on Heavenly Sword, Enslaved, and DmC: Devil May Cry before Microsoft acquired it in 2018. It had roughly 135 employees as of this past July, split across multiple countries. Xbox hasn’t said how many of those roles are being cut in this round, but the consultation process gives Microsoft room to keep exploring a last-minute buyer even as individual staff are let go.

What happens to Senua

The clearest casualty is Senua — the working title for Ninja Theory’s next project, a bigger action-adventure follow-up to the Hellblade series that Xbox showed off barely four months before the September closure announcement. Unlike Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (2017) and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (2024), which both shipped, this third game now has no studio left to finish it. Booty has said Microsoft will keep “exploring other options” during the consultation, leaving a sliver of room for a buyer to still emerge, but with senior technical and gameplay staff already departing, the practical odds of Senua reaching release in anything like its announced form are shrinking by the week.

Part of a bigger pattern

Ninja Theory’s closure is the clearest individual casualty of a restructuring that has now run for three months and claimed far more than one studio. The same July memo that put Ninja Theory up for sale also pushed Compulsion Games and Double Fine into independence, while a follow-up round in September moved Halo development to Activision and folded Obsidian into Bethesda. Undead Labs, sold off in the same July batch as Ninja Theory, completed its split and is now operating independently — the opposite outcome from the one Ninja Theory is living through this week. Insider Gaming has reported Xbox’s broader restructuring is still only “three-quarters” complete, which means Ninja Theory’s closure likely won’t be the last name added to this list before the reset finishes playing out.

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For the full timeline of how Xbox’s 2026 restructuring reached this point, read our earlier coverage of Xbox’s 2026 reset and its four studio spinoffs and Halo’s move to Activision alongside Ninja Theory’s collapsed sale.