On SEPTEMBER 30, Road to VR framed Mighty Coconut’s SECOND 2026 DOWNSIZING as more than a single-studio note. About TEN staff will leave over the coming months — roughly THIRTY-FIVE PERCENT of the team that survived January’s cut — while Walkabout Mini Golf keeps shipping COURSES on a tighter cadence.
CEO Lucas Martell’s SEPTEMBER 28 studio UPDATE is blunt. “Due to the current state of the games industry and especially VR, Mighty Coconut will need to DOWNSIZE,” he wrote, adding that funding, HARDWARE, and press attention have been “diverted elsewhere.” The line that carries the piece: without a steady stream of NEW PLAYERS into VR and Walkabout, “the scale at which we’ve been operating is no longer SUSTAINABLE.”
Steam’s Public Signal
VR.org (Evan Marcus, SEPTEMBER 29) put numbers under that claim using Steam’s monthly REVIEW history for Walkabout. Steam logged about 1,038 new reviews in 2022, then 647, 363, 265, and only 112 so far in 2026 — roughly an EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT drop in review FLOW from the 2022 peak. Reviews are not SALES, and Quest remains Walkabout’s larger home, but the RATE of new reviews is a fair proxy for new OWNERS finding the game.
A Wider Studio Squeeze
Road to VR’s SEPTEMBER 30 report is careful to place the cut inside a broader 2026 PATTERN. Meta’s Reality Labs group saw a reported TEN PERCENT staff reduction earlier this year that included closures at Sanzaru Games, Armature Studio, and Twisted Pixel. Industry budget pressure also reportedly cancelled a Harry Potter VR title from Skydance, a Batman: Arkham Shadows SEQUEL from Sanzaru, and a major project at Polyarc — the Moss studio that SHUTTERED last month.
What Still Ships
Martell says Walkabout is NOT shutting down. COURSES continue, “a little less often,” as the studio returns to a smaller FOOTPRINT. Escape from Planet Xylodon — course 42 — still LOCKS October 8 across Quest, SteamVR, PlayStation VR2, Pico, and Galaxy XR. Work continues on Walkabout Dungeon Golfer, a hybrid VR/flatscreen ROGUELIKE, and on publishing the flatscreen lawn-care title GRASS, Martell’s stated path to DIVERSIFY revenue.
VR.org also flags a PLATFORM twist: Meta VR Glasses, due SPRING 2027 at $1,299.99, ship without CONTROLLERS in the box and will surface hand-tracked titles first. Walkabout’s Meta Store listing still shows CONTROLLERS as the supported input. Steam Frame, by contrast, ships with controllers and lists Walkabout as Great on Frame — but Frame volumes remain unclear while reservation emails roll.
For players, the near-term calendar still has XYLODON on October 8. For the studio, the SEPTEMBER statements read as a bet that a smaller TEAM, fewer COURSES, and non-VR side projects can keep the servers and the putter ALIVE.