Bit Reactor, the studio behind Star Wars Zero Company, appears to have gone through another round of layoffs in early November 2026. The picture comes from posts by former employees on LinkedIn and other platforms, and it comes just weeks after furloughed staff had started returning following the game’s August launch.
The cuts weren’t announced officially, the total still isn’t clear, and neither Bit Reactor nor publisher Electronic Arts (EA) has said anything publicly. Posts from former employees suggest the layoffs hit art, UI/UX, production, and QA. Among those affected were a senior environment artist and a UI engineer.
It’s the second major disruption in a matter of months. Earlier reports said Bit Reactor had run out of money and furloughed as much as 80% of its staff, and by October more than half had reportedly returned. Star Wars Zero Company reviewed well and, based on earlier sales reports, sold 1 million copies in its first month for an estimated $52.2 million.
Those numbers might sound reassuring at first glance, but they don’t necessarily mean the studio was on solid ground. Platform fees, Disney licensing, publisher recoupment, and reports that EA invested about $50 million could have sharply limited how much money Bit Reactor actually saw. There’s also still no official explanation for the November layoffs, whether this was post-launch support downsizing, a restructuring move, or something more serious.
Star Wars Zero Company is available now, and these cuts line up with a broader downturn that wiped out about 45,000 games jobs from 2022 to mid-2025, based on industry layoff trackers and related reports.
That makes the earlier furlough story a useful marker for how quickly the situation changed: it showed staff coming back after the launch, and this new round of cuts suggests that recovery may have been temporary. The missing official explanation leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but the shift from rehiring to layoffs is the clearest sign yet that the studio’s post-launch picture is still unstable.
Author: Emmanuel Bosque
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