State of Decay dev became an "employee-owned studio" following ongoing restructuring at Xbox

Undead Labs studio boss Philip Holt is "reluctant to share" how many employees the developer lost when it became independent of Xbox.

"It was a total heartbreak to have to part ways," he recently told The Game Business. "I would hate to reduce the impact to those individuals to a number or statistic."

Holt acknowledged he was "irresponsibly transparent" with staff during Undead Labs' transition to an "employee-owned studio."

"Rather than keeping them in the dark and manufacture some alternate reality, I just brought them alongside. That probably reduced some anxiety," he explained. "I tried to put myself in their shoes. You're not in control, you don't really know what's happening, you know your job might be at risk, and you're wondering if this game is actually going to finish."

"I tried to share as much as I could. We had pretty direct conversations. We talked early on that under probably any scenario, there'd be job losses. On the day of the layoff, people were prepared. That ended up being a real courtesy, as painful as it was. Nobody wants to lose a job, but I think people understood the reason."

Holt added: "As a result, the surviving team doesn’t look at the company, or at me, as someone who's done great damage to the people they love. They saw it as a necessary consequence of the reality that we're in."

To achieve independence from Xbox, Holt established a corporate entity called Full Measure, making all employees shareholders.

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