Refactor Games Lays Off 85 Percent of Staff Two Months After Netflix FIFA Launch

Refactor Games, the studio behind the first FIFA-branded soccer game not published by EA Sports, has laid off roughly 85 percent of its workforce less than two months after FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition shipped on Netflix. Studio head Nathan Burba confirmed the cuts to GamesBeat, and former employees took to LinkedIn over the weekend to say they had been terminated without warning. The game is still on the Netflix Games catalog and the studio's American football project Football Simulator is still live on Steam Early Access, but the people who built the launch appear to be gone.

Sources told Insider Gaming that publisher and part-owner Delphi Interactive pulled funding right after the game shipped, calling staff into a general meeting on Friday, July 31 and letting them go that same day. Friday also happened to be payday, so the date of the layoff was the date of the final check. No severance was offered. Polygon, Eurogamer, Game Developer and GamesIndustry.biz all confirmed the story within 24 hours, and the broader games press is now treating FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition as the first major Netflix Games casualty of 2026.

What we know about the studio and the game

Refactor Games was founded in 2021 by Nathan Burba, the co-founder of VR studio Survios, and started life building Football Simulator, a physics-heavy American football title that launched into Steam Early Access in 2022. Football Simulator is still on the storefront, and it actually holds a Very Positive user review consensus, although SteamDB data shows it peaked at 188 concurrent players in January 2025 and crawled to a 10-player high over the past 24 hours. Refactor was, in other words, a small shop with one quiet sports sim and a handful of VR, EA Sports and 2K Sports alumni.

The bigger play came in 2024, when Refactor and Delphi Interactive announced a new, FIFA-licensed soccer game for Netflix Games. Delphi is the LA-based publisher-developer behind the new 007: First Light at IO Interactive, and its CEO Casper Daugaard told GamesIndustry.biz earlier this year that Delphi part-owns Refactor with backing from Andreessen Horowitz's Speedrun fund. Delphi handled creative direction, production, technology and publishing while Refactor, sitting inside Delphi's LA office, did the bulk of the dev work. FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition hit Netflix on June 11, 2026, and Netflix's Q2 fiscal report later called it one of its two most successful cloud-game debuts, with 1.5 million players in the first week.

How the studio went from 1.5 million players to mass layoffs

Ex-art director Barclay Chantel posted on LinkedIn that Delphi pulled the plug on Refactor Studios right after the FIFA World Cup game shipped for Netflix and that the entire studio was let go on the same day. Another impacted worker, posting in a separate thread, said the parent company unfortunately pulled funding and the entire team, myself included, was laid off. The news is consistent across Polygon, GamesBeat, Game Developer, Eurogamer and Inside Gaming, which is unusually tight sourcing for a story of this size. About 80 people were affected, multiple outlets reported, and Friday, July 31 was both the layoff date and the final paycheck.

For a project Netflix was still calling a top-tier performer in its Q2 report, the speed of the collapse is the headline. FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition launched less than 60 days before the cuts, hit 1.5 million players in week one, was promoted with a Couch Cup tournament at Fanatics Fest in mid-July, and then had its entire dev team dissolved in a single Friday afternoon with no severance. Delphi has not commented publicly, and Netflix declined comment. Refactor Games is reportedly regrouping with the hope of rehiring some of the laid-off staff for other projects, but the people who were in that general meeting were told nothing about a return on the day they were let go.

The reviews told you this was coming

The studio was always going to be on borrowed time if the game landed the way the press said it did. Aftermath's review of FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition called the experience a modern hellscape and an embarrassment to everyone involved, and that was the critical consensus, not a hot take. Polygon framed the project as the first FIFA-branded video game since EA Sports lost the license, with plenty of skepticism about whether anyone other than EA could ship a credible soccer sim, and the answers were not kind. Even Netflix's own framing of the game as a top-tier performer was about player counts, not review scores, and the difference between those two numbers is exactly the kind of thing publishers tend to ignore until they run out of patience.

Community reaction is muted but pointed. Polygon, GameSpot, Game Developer, Eurogamer and Kotaku all led with neutral-to-skeptical coverage, the Eurogamer.pt tweet read the studio its last rites in Portuguese, and Brazilian outlet Olhar Digital pointed out that the studio effectively shut down eight weeks after launch. Untitled Copy noted the irony that Netflix had publicly called the game a success even as employees were announcing their layoffs on LinkedIn. The thread of reactions is consistent: nobody is mourning the game, plenty of people are angry on behalf of the developers, and a few are pointing out that Delphi still has 007: First Light on the runway and now has no first-party soccer dev to follow it up with.

What this means for Netflix Games and the next licensed soccer attempt

Netflix Games is now in an awkward position. The service launched its first FIFA-branded title in 2026 with a real license, real distribution, and a real marketing push around the actual World Cup tournament, and the studio behind it was dead within 60 days of the launch. The service still has Stranger Things, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and a steady drip of Netflix Originals, but the launch that was supposed to prove Netflix could ship a competitive live-service sports game just became the first major cancellation of the year. If Netflix wants to keep its cloud-games pitch alive, somebody is going to have to explain how a top-tier performer is also a studio the publisher cannot fund for another year.

For the soccer sim market, the larger story is that Delphi's grand experiment, build a full-fledged internal studio with an A16z-backed developer and outsourcers, then publish a FIFA game outside of EA, has burned out in less than a year. EA Sports FC still owns the simulation soccer space. Konami's eFootball is the long-running alternative. The next licensed soccer game is going to have a hard time convincing publishers, players or platforms that the same model will work a second time, which is bad news for anyone hoping EA's monopoly on serious soccer games was about to crack. Refactor and Delphi proved the door is open, then walked through it into a wall. The 80 people who got laid off on a Friday afternoon are the ones paying for the experiment.