Just a few weeks after Netflix praised its game FIFA World Cup on an earnings call, and even less weeks after publisher Delphi Interactive’s CEO Casper Daugaard said the game was “doing extremely well,” FIFA developer Refactor Games has reportedly been shut down, according to Game Developer. Delphi is part owner of Refactor, and workers claim the company pulled funding and that employees were let go.
“Delphi just pulled the plug on Refactor studios right after we shipped the FIFA World Cup game for Netflix. The entire studio was let go today,“ wrote an art director on LinkedIn. “Last Friday marked the end of my chapter at Refactor Games as I was laid off along with the rest of the studio,” wrote a senior producer. A senior UI artist wrote that “the studio’s parent company unfortunately pulled funding, and the entire team, myself included, was laid off.” A QA lead wrote that the company “is closing its doors after the highly successful launch of FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition on Netflix Games.” A technical artist, meanwhile, wrote that the company “had to lay off the vast majority of their studio, including me.”
Aftermath has reached out to Refactor for more information.
FIFA launched in June on Netflix, and while Luke didn’t like it much, a person familiar told GameFile the game had garnered 1.5 million players in its first week. While it doesn’t appear Netflix had anything to do with Refactor’s shutdown, that company also loves to praise the games on its platform and then axe their studios, having previously closed Squid Game: Unleashed developer Boss Fight days after hyping the game in an earnings call in October 2025.
Whether or not FIFA was actually any good is somewhat beside the point here. The point is that both Delphi and Netflix publicly said it was good, with Netflix claiming in its most recent earnings call that “FIFA and Unhinged became our 2 most successful cloud game debuts, really solid numbers that put it in the top tier of game performance for us.” Whatever actual numbers are behind Netflix calling the game “successful,” or what Delphi’s Daugaard meant by it doing “extremely well,” that these companies put up a proud front only for the axe to swiftly fall feels like one more example of the prevailing trend in the games industry today, where layoffs happen and studios get axed no matter how a game performs. And while FIFA’s popularity was tied to the World Cup, surely the studio had not suddenly outlived its usefulness now that the World Cup is over, if it has in fact been shut down. At the very least, Refactor currently has an early access football game, which has “mostly positive” reviews on Steam.
Delphi also had a hand in 007 First Light. That game’s developer, IO Interactive, recently had layoffs after Microsoft pulled funding for an in-development fantasy RPG.
Luke Plunkett
