Mighty Coconut, the Austin studio behind Walkabout Mini Golf, said on September 28, 2026 that it will part with 10 people over the coming months. It is the studio's second reduction this year. The reason its CEO gives is not the game's performance but VR's contraction, and the studio publishes enough of its own figures for a reader to check both halves of that claim.
In short:
- What was announced: 10 people leaving over "the next several months", in a company blog post signed by chief executive Lucas Martell and Sarah Balman. It follows an earlier round in January.
- The reason given: the state of the games industry "and especially VR". The post says funding, hardware and press attention have "largely been diverted elsewhere" and that there is no "steady stream of new players coming into VR and Walkabout".
- What the announcement does not give: no percentage, no remaining headcount, no revenue figure and no unit sales figure. It names none of the people leaving.
- What is checkable: four of the five changes the studio announced in January can be confirmed from outside it, two of them on public storefronts today.
- What continues: course releases, at a slower pace, plus two unreleased games. Martell writes that "Walkabout isn't going anywhere."
What Mighty Coconut announced
Ten people are leaving, over several months rather than at once. Martell frames the post as an update to players rather than an investor note, opening that it is "an incredibly hard message to write" and that he wants "to continue to be transparent with the Walkabout community".
The post states a cause and a consequence. The cause is the market. The consequence is scale: "without a steady stream of new players coming into VR and Walkabout, the scale at which we've been operating is no longer sustainable." Martell also places the studio against its peers, writing that its catalog has "allowed us to fare better than many studios who have had to close completely".
Three things are said to continue. Courses keep coming, "a little less often due to the reduced team size that returns us to the small and scrappy way we started". Two unreleased titles, Walkabout Dungeon Golfer and Grass, stay in development, which Martell describes as the way "to diversify our revenue stream and stabilize things". And the servers stay up, which the post lists alongside keeping the game alive as the reason for the cut.
The studio also published a reverse-recruiting list naming people who are looking for work, which Martell addresses to anyone in the game industry hiring.
No proportion appears anywhere in the announcement. The studio's team page listed 28 names when it was read on September 30, 2026, but that page carries no update date and Mighty Coconut has not said whether it reflects the roster after January. The figure the company has published is 10 people.
What reason does the studio give
The market, not the game. The announcement is specific about which part of the market, naming three things that moved away at once: "it is going through a massive and rapid shift as funding, hardware and press attention have largely been diverted elsewhere."
Martell also concedes a forecasting error rather than presenting the cut as a plan. "While we already downsized last January, I failed to anticipate just how rapidly and deeply this trajectory would continue."
The demand claim is the one a reader can put beside independent measurement. BestInXR's report on VR headset shipments in the second quarter of 2026 records a fall of 18 percent year over year against AR device shipments up 138 percent, which is the hardware side of the same squeeze a developer feels as fewer new players. On the supply side, the corpus already documents Reality Labs cutting roughly a tenth of its staff in BestInXR's survey of the companies building XR. The studio layoff is the content side of a contraction the site has been recording from the hardware side all year.
Why this studio's own numbers matter here
Because Mighty Coconut published its scale a year before it published its contraction, so the claim that the game did not fail is the company's own, not an inference.
Its five-year retrospective of September 15, 2025 gives 43,365,815 total sessions played, 23,004,672 hours in the game, over 2 billion putts and players in more than 40 countries. It describes the game as "the 20th best selling title of all time for Meta Quest" and a "top 20 selling PlayStation VR2 title since launch". Martell is quoted in it saying "Everything you see in Walkabout has been funded 100% by people purchasing the game, courses and growing our community by telling others."
That last line is the pivot. A studio that says it is funded entirely by sales has its revenue tied directly to new buyers arriving, which is the exact quantity the 2026 post says has stopped. The 2025 post presents self-funding as a point of pride. The 2026 post shows its other edge.
The game's standing has not visibly dropped in the meantime. Its Meta Horizon Store listing carries a Top Rated badge, a 4.8 average from 14,000 ratings and 33 add-ons, at $24.99 for the base game. The Steam edition is the same price.
The January changes, and what the storefront shows
Four of the five can be confirmed from outside the studio, and the pricing one is visible to anyone who opens the store page.
On January 23, 2026 Martell published a list of upcoming changes alongside what that post calls "the announced staff reductions". New courses would rise by $1 to $4.99 starting with the next release, while "all previously released courses will stay at their current prices". New courses would stop on Pocket Edition for iOS. Employee Mode, Chess and Slingshots would be scaled back. And 2026 would carry six courses instead of the usual seven, with a longer summer break.
The price boundary landed exactly where the post said it would. Every course released before the announcement is still $3.99. Every one after it is $4.99.
| DLC release | Steam release date | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | December 4, 2025 | $3.99 |
| Tiki à Coco | January 15, 2026 | $3.99 |
| Hollywood | March 12, 2026 | $4.99 |
| Blokhaven | May 7, 2026 | $4.99 |
| Homestar Runner Distraction Pack | June 25, 2026 | $4.99 |
| Gloop Lair | August 13, 2026 | $4.99 |
Tiki à Coco shipped on January 15, eight days before the announcement, and holds its $3.99. Hollywood was the next release and is $4.99. The promise that older courses would not be repriced also held: all 24 DLC releases that shipped before the announcement are still $3.99 on Steam, against four at $4.99 since. That is a small thing to verify and a useful one, because it is the difference between a studio announcing a price rise and a studio quietly applying it to a back catalog.
The cadence claim is harder to score and is left open here. Gloop Lair on August 13 was the most recent course on Steam as of September 30, and the studio has not published a release date for the next one.
Pocket Edition is no longer sold
The iOS version is gone from the App Store, which is what the studio said would happen.
The January post said new courses would stop on Pocket Edition and that crossplay with VR would be "sunsetting that at some point". On April 30 the studio set the date: crossplay would be removed "starting with the release of Blokhaven on May 7th", and "we will also stop selling Pocket Edition on the App Store altogether". Existing owners keep what they bought and it "will continue to work for the foreseeable future", without updates. DLC courses became unpurchasable at the same point.
That withdrawal is now observable. The App Store page for the app, id1531384971, returns a 404 and Apple's lookup service returns no record for it, checked in a browser on September 30, 2026. Mighty Coconut's two other iOS apps are still listed under its developer name, so this is one product removed rather than a developer account closed.
Walkabout has now narrowed three times
This is the third documented contraction of where the game runs or how large the team is, and the first two were also announced by the studio.
The earliest was not the studio's decision. Its Quest 1 notice explains that Oculus SDK v51 "is not compatible with Quest 1", so continuing meant a "frozen" build for those players that "will not receive any further course or feature updates". Meta's own store listing repeats the consequence, noting that new DLC courses are unavailable to Quest 1 players after Journey to the Center of the Earth in June 2023, along with cross-headset multiplayer. A platform holder's toolchain requirement ended support for a headset generation, and the developer absorbed it.
The second was iOS, in May 2026. The third is the team itself, in September. Read together they describe a studio steadily reducing surface area to protect one product on four VR platforms, which is a narrower business than the one described in the 2025 retrospective.
What is not established here
Several figures a reader might expect are not published and are not estimated in this post.
Mighty Coconut has published no headcount alongside either 2026 reduction, and the January blog post refers to staff cuts without stating their size. It publishes no revenue, no unit sales and no active player count. Nothing in either announcement attributes the cut to a specific platform, a specific storefront's terms or a specific competitor. The 2025 retrospective's "20th best selling title of all time for Meta Quest" is the studio's own claim and Meta publishes no sales ranking that would confirm it.
Related reading. The quarterly shipments report has the hardware numbers behind the demand claim, the XR graveyard records products and platforms with a documented end, and the survey of XR companies covers the corporate cuts on the hardware side of the same year. Our Meta Quest reference covers what is still sold new, what was discontinued and where business buyers now stand.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. How many people is Mighty Coconut laying off?
Ten, over what the studio calls "the next several months", announced on September 28, 2026. The company has not published a percentage or the size of the team that remains.
2. Is Walkabout Mini Golf shutting down?
No. The studio states that "Walkabout isn't going anywhere", that servers stay active and that courses will keep coming, though less often than the roughly seven a year it previously shipped.
3. Why did Walkabout Mini Golf DLC go up to $4.99?
Mighty Coconut raised new courses by $1 in January 2026, saying it was "the most direct way to support development as DLCs have grown in complexity". Courses released before then stayed at $3.99, and the storefront still shows both prices.
4. Can I still buy Walkabout Mini Golf on iPhone or iPad?
No. Mighty Coconut stopped selling Pocket Edition on the App Store in May 2026 and removed crossplay with VR players at the same time. Existing owners keep the app and its courses, without further updates.
5. What reason does the studio give for the cuts?
The state of VR rather than the game. Its announcement cites funding, hardware and press attention being "diverted elsewhere" and the absence of a steady stream of new players entering VR.
