Star Wars Zero Company developer Bit Reactor has laid off an unspecified number of staff, a month after bringing some of its furloughed team back to work.
Several developers announced on LinkedIn on Friday, 6th November, that they had been let go, as first reported by Bespin Bulletin. Bit Reactor hasn’t said how many people are affected.
Star Wars: Zero Company – Official Final Trailer.Watch on YouTube
Among them is senior environment artist Ryan Lopez, who spent three and a half years working on Zero Company, from pre-production to launch, and was laid off after a three-month furlough. UI engineer Tyler Eichten, who worked on much of the on-screen UI for the game’s tactical missions, and Ryan Mosher from the QA team have also confirmed they were let go.
“While it stings, I’m really proud of what we built together,” Lopez wrote. “It was a privilege to ship a game with you.”
Bit Reactor furloughed most of its staff in the weeks before Zero Company launched on 27th August, with one source putting the figure at roughly 80 percent. The studio appeared to have run out of money just short of release.
The game did well regardless, and is thought to have sold more than a million copies within a month. Then, in a message shared on Bluesky on 7th October, CEO Greg Foertsch said the studio had “started the process of returning more of our team back to work”. Asking staff to step away so close to launch was “an incredibly difficult decision”, he said, “but one that was necessary to help us eventually bring as many people back as possible”.
It’s thought more than half the studio returned, though not everyone went back on full pay. It’s not clear whether any of those who returned were among the people laid off this week.
In Eurogamer’s Star Wars Zero Company review, we awarded the game four out of five stars, saying, “an already winning genre is matched with the perfect setting in this earnest, heartfelt, smart and slightly ramshackle turn-based tactics gem”.