Developer Bit Reactor has admitted 80% of the team on Star Wars Zero Company were put on unpaid leave just weeks before the game came out.
It’s been less than a week since the launch of Star Wars Zero Company, which we were happy to describe as the best Star Wars strategy game ever made and probably the closest we’ll ever get to an XCOM 3.
As such, we had hoped that the first bit of post-launch news would be about how it’s already made enough money to convince publisher EA to greenlight a sequel. Sadly, an update about developer Bit Reactor has been anything but positive.
It turns out that most of the studio’s employees had been put on mandatory, unpaid leave weeks before Zero Company’s launch, meaning they weren’t working on the game in the vital few weeks before it came out.
The concept is relatively commonplace in the US, where it’s known as being furloughed, although the idea has begun to take root in the UK since Covid. It’s not the same as a leave of absence, since you’re not paid- you just have a vague promise that they’ll try and bring you back later.
Game File broke the news after being contacted by a Bit Reactor representative, with other sources alleging that 80% of the team had been affected and only a skeleton crew was currently working on post-launch support, like bug fixing.
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We did think, when we interviewed Bit Reactor shortly before launch, that they seemed rather jittery, but we had chalked that up to simply pre-release nerves.
According to, Game File the decision to furlough staff was made by Bit Reactor itself, simply because they’d ran out of money and couldn’t afford to keep paying staff.
We can only hope Zero Company is performing well enough to turn around Bit Reactor’s fortunes. At the time of writing, there’s no sales data, but according to Steam Charts it’s the best-selling game here in the UK and the third best-selling game in the US, behind only Counter-Strike 2 and The Blood Of Dawnwalker.
It also has a healthy peak user count of 77,889, although whether that’s good enough to please publisher EA is unknown, especially as the Star Wars licence will affect the game’s overall profitability, as Disney take their cut.
Bit Reactor is apparently hopeful that it can bring back all the furloughed staff with restored pay, which would suggest that they believe Zero Company’s launch has been successful.
However, senior technical artist Zachariah Scott, who left Bit Reactor in 2023, told Game File that he has spoken with members of staff and that they’re not as confident about everyone getting their old jobs back.
It’s also difficult to be optimistic about Zero Company’s future considering the recent changes at EA. Since it’snow a private company under the control of a new group of investors, EA has taken on $20 billion (£14.8 billion) in debt, which means it needs to make a lot of money and fast.
This is why further layoffs are expected at the company as a whole, as well as increased prioritisation of EA’s most profitable franchises, like EA Sports FC. Something like Zero Company is unlikely to match those levels of success, so it will become an early test for exactly how EA is going to operate under its new conditions.
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