Star Wars Zero Company launched on August 27 to the best reviews a Star Wars game has earned in more than two decades, and to the biggest Steam launch the franchise has ever had. But weeks before any of that happened — before a single review went live, before the first player deployed a squad — developer Bit Reactor had already furloughed much of the team that built it.
The furloughs were first reported by Stephen Totilo at Game File, and Bit Reactor has since confirmed to Game Developer that the studio suspended staff ahead of the game's release. What makes the story unusual isn't that a studio cut costs. It's that the cost-cutting was a bet against a game that appears, so far, to have won.
What actually happened at Bit Reactor
According to Game File, Bit Reactor furloughed employees roughly three weeks before the August 27 launch. Furloughed staff were suspended without pay.
The scale is where the reporting gets careful, and where coverage elsewhere has gotten sloppy. Two different figures are circulating, and neither is a company-confirmed number:
- One source told Game File that around 80% of the team was furloughed.
- Another described only a "skeleton crew" left on active payroll.
- A separate court filing dated August 12 stated that Bit Reactor "has furloughed most of its employees and terminated contractors."
Zachariah Scott, a senior technical artist at the studio from early 2023 until May 2026, told Game File he had spoken with nearly a dozen Bit Reactor workers who gave consistent accounts of the furloughs. Scott also said furloughed staff were cut off from potential profit sharing.
Bit Reactor's position is that this was its own call. A studio representative told Game File the decision came from Bit Reactor alone — not from publisher EA, and not from Star Wars license holder Disney. The representative characterized it as a difficult decision made before anyone knew how the launch would perform, and said the studio hopes to bring furloughed workers back with restored pay if the game succeeds.
There is also a longer-running dispute in the background. Co-founder Alison Kelly sued co-founder Greg Foertsch in 2024 over ownership stakes, alleging breach of contract and unjust enrichment, and seeking damages in excess of $20 million. That trial was pushed from June 2026 to early 2027. The lawsuit and the furloughs are separate matters, but the August filing is where the "most of its employees" language originates.
The launch complicates the story
If the furloughs were a hedge against a soft release, the hedge looks badly timed.
Zero Company landed at a Metacritic score in the mid-80s — the highest for a Star Wars game since Knights of the Old Republic II in 2004, and ahead of recent franchise entries like Star Wars Outlaws. OpenCritic's aggregate tells a similar story.
On Steam, the numbers are stronger still. SteamDB's public chart recorded an all-time peak of 77,889 concurrent players on August 30, three days after release — enough to make it the franchise's biggest Steam launch, surpassing Jedi: Fallen Order. The game has also been sitting near the top of Steam's global top sellers since launch.
A caveat worth keeping in mind: Steam concurrents and top-seller placement measure activity and gross revenue rank, not profit. Console performance on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S hasn't been broken out publicly, and EA hasn't published sales figures. What we can say is that the commercial disaster the furloughs were apparently insuring against has not, on the available evidence, materialized.
Why a hit doesn't automatically save a studio
It's tempting to read the gap between the game's reception and the team's status as pure callousness. The reality is duller and, in some ways, more troubling: launch revenue and studio cash flow are not the same thing.
A work-for-hire or publisher-funded developer typically spends years on a milestone-based budget. Revenue from a launch flows to the publisher first and reaches the developer later — through recoupment, royalty schedules, or bonus structures that can take quarters to resolve. A studio can therefore be building a hit and running low on operating cash at the same time, particularly if its next project isn't yet greenlit and funded.
That structural reality is not unique to Bit Reactor, and it's worth stating plainly that the specific terms of Bit Reactor's arrangement with EA have not been made public. What is public is the studio's own framing: the furloughs were a pre-launch risk decision, and reinstatement is tied to how the game performs.
The open question: what happens to post-launch support?
For players, this is the part that matters most immediately.
If a skeleton crew is what remains on payroll, the practical questions are patches, bug fixes, balance passes, and whatever post-launch content EA and Bit Reactor may have planned. Neither company has announced a reduction in support, and it would be wrong to assume one — a furlough is by definition temporary, and studios routinely staff down after a release regardless of circumstances.
But nobody has announced a roadmap either. For a squad-based tactics game whose long tail depends on iteration, that silence is conspicuous.
What to watch next
Three concrete developments would resolve most of the ambiguity here:
- Reinstatements. Bit Reactor said it hopes to restore pay and bring workers back if the game succeeds. By the studio's own metric, that condition looks close to met.
- A post-launch roadmap. Any announcement of patches, DLC, or seasonal content would indicate the staffing needed to deliver it.
- The Kelly v. Foertsch trial , now scheduled for early 2027, which may surface more about the studio's finances than either co-founder intends.
Star Wars Zero Company is currently the best-reviewed Star Wars game in 22 years. Whether the people who made it are back on payroll to see it is, for now, unanswered.
