‘We all got laid off’, says former Deck Nine narrative designer, after no-one was around to pick up Life is Strange: Double Exposure’s GDC Awards win

I’m not entirely sure Life is Strange: Double Exposure was a good idea conceptually—nor was series fan and PC Gamer writer Mollie Taylor, who played the thing and had a good, if “unnecessary-feeling”, time.

That doesn’t mean I’m greeting today’s news with any particular sense of joy. Quite the opposite: The fact that nobody picked up the game’s GDC award is depressing as all hell, to me. At this point, the signs that this industry is messed the hell up are less warning lights and more a claxon I’ve had to wearily blot out with earplugs just to stay sane.

As you can see in the video above (via IGN), Life is Strange: Double Exposure won the event’s Social Impact Award, competing against 1,000 Times Resist, Astro Bot, Frostpunk 2, and Neva. Introduced to the event in 2022, the award “recognizes a game that advances equality, justice, intersectionality, and/or sustainability, and works to positively impact lives in a meaningful way”. I’m sure this is a cold comfort to the fact nobody told Life is Strange: Double Exposure’s developers that they ought to be around to collect it.

Stephen Totilo, a journalist who was backstage at the time, wrote the following: “Nearly every game that won had people coming through, beaming with their trophy in hand. It stood out that, for Life is Strange, which won the Social Impact award, there was no one.”

As to why? Well, according to former Deck Nine dev, narrative designer and writer Elizabeth Ballou on BlueSky, it was because no-one at the team expected it, because, well, “We all got laid off”. She writes: “It’s fitting that nobody was there to accept the GDCA award that Double Exposure won, because we all got laid off lol … (Don’t be sad for me, I am very lucky and I work on BitLife now and I love it).”

Ballou worked at Deck Nine for almost two years, and was part of the first wave of layoffs that hit the studio in February 2024. And, respectfully, I’m gonna be a little sad for her, and her colleagues, since her studio was hit with a second wave of layoffs in December, substantial enough to lead to this entire situation.

This entire situation could be down to miscommunication on behalf of the event’s organisers, mind, as Ballou does note that “a bunch of us are at GDC, but we didn’t know we were even nominated so nobody was prepared to accept anything”.

But it’s not entirely unreasonable to draw the conclusion that if you worked on a game and got laid off from the studio, you might not be notified that it’s up for an award—you might not even fathom it as a possibility, especially since Square Enix rather flatly said it lost them money during a financial meeting recently. More grim is the implication that Deck Nine didn’t have anyone to send.

Ballou would later post an image of the award, adding: “Please hire the people who made this game and got laid off”.

It’s a grimly appropriate example of just how awful it’s been in the industry as a whole these past few years. So much so that The Game Awards last year, historically a show with a celebratory, ‘everything’s fine’ vibe, had to throw its hands up and say yeah, the situation’s messed up.