Bit Reactor, the studio behind Star Wars Zero Company, has laid off an unspecified number of staff, a month after it began bringing furloughed developers back to work.
Several developers announced their departures on LinkedIn on Friday, November 6, with the first reports surfacing the same day. Bit Reactor has not said how many people are affected, and no studio statement on the cuts has been released.
Who is leaving
Among those let go is senior environment artist Ryan Lopez, who spent three and a half years on Zero Company from pre-production through launch, according to his LinkedIn post, and who had been laid off after roughly three months on furlough. UI engineer Tyler Eichten and senior quality assurance analyst Ryan Mosher, who joined Bit Reactor in October 2024 after two years at Firaxis and two more at 1047 Games, also confirmed they had lost their jobs.
“While it stings, I’m really proud of what we built together. It was a privilege to ship a game with you,” Lopez wrote on LinkedIn.
A month after the rehires
The cuts come weeks after a turbulent stretch for the Maryland studio. In the weeks before Zero Company launched on August 27, Bit Reactor furloughed most of its staff, with one source putting the figure at roughly 80 percent, and the studio was reported to have run out of most of its money just short of release.
On October 7, CEO Greg Foertsch said the studio had “started the process of returning more of our team back to work” in a message on Bluesky, calling the furlough an answer to unexpected business developments outside of the studio’s control and “an incredibly difficult decision.”
https://bsky.app/profile/bitreactor.com/post/3mxcgabtzjk2b
The turnaround came despite a successful launch. Zero Company, a turn-based tactics game set at the end of the Clone Wars published by Electronic Arts, was critically acclaimed and is thought to have sold more than one million copies within a month of release.
