9/1/26

Bit Reactor put part of its team on unpaid leave even before the release of Star Wars Zero Company

Companies' News

The studio Bit Reactor has confirmed that it placed part of its staff on unpaid leave before the release of its debut game. The tactical Star Wars Zero Company went on sale on 27 August 2026, but the decision to temporarily suspend employees without pay was made before the release — out of concern that the project would perform weakly at launch.

The studio describes this as a temporary measure: a Bit Reactor representative told the publication Game File that the company expects to bring the suspended employees back and restore their pay if Star Wars Zero Company proves successful.

Bit Reactor отправила часть команды в неоплачиваемый отпуск ещё до релиза Star Wars Zero Company — Key art for Star Wars Zero Company. Image: Bit Reactor / via Game Developer

The company has not publicly specified the exact scale of the suspensions. Sources give harsher estimates: according to one of them, around 80 percent of the team was placed on unpaid leave. Another source reported that only a minimal core remained on active payroll at the American studio.

Employees themselves have also spoken publicly about what is happening. A former Bit Reactor worker wrote on LinkedIn that he was fired after being forcibly placed on medical leave, and that he was forbidden from discussing these circumstances with friends and colleagues. According to him, management kept the team «in limbo» through a good attitude and empty promises. He separately claims that the suspended employees were cut off from any possible profit sharing.

How the game is selling across all platforms is not publicly known. As of the publication of this material, Star Wars Zero Company, published by Electronic Arts, remains among the top-selling Steam releases by revenue.

Unpaid leave is becoming a convenient substitute for layoffs

Formally, unpaid leave looks softer than dismissal: the employee stays on the roster, their position is preserved, and the company pays no severance and reports no mass layoffs. In practice, the difference for a developer may be small — they receive no money, and whether they are brought back or not depends on sales figures they have no influence over.

The emergence of such a scheme is probably tied to the overall state of the industry. For the past few years the games industry has lived in a mode of constant headcount contraction, and studios are looking for ways to survive the period between the end of production and the first money from sales without disbanding the team for good. The most vulnerable here are independent studios working for a publisher: their employment peak falls on the final stage of development, and once the build is delivered there is nothing to support a full roster with — even though the franchise rights, marketing and deadlines are controlled not by the studio.

The problem is that this kind of saving hits the main asset of such teams — people with rare specialist experience. Specialists left without pay for an indefinite period usually do not wait to see how the revenue count ends, but move on to where they are paid. If the situation drags on, the studio will probably have to be rebuilt with a different line-up, and the experience accumulated on the project will leave along with the people.

For the industry, this case matters as a precedent. If the practice takes hold, candidates will have to find out at hiring not only the terms of the contract and whether there is overtime, but also whether the employer can unilaterally suspend payments after the project is delivered and what happens to profit sharing in that case. For studios the risk runs the other way: an employer's reputation spreads quickly in game development, and a team once left without wages while waiting for sales is unlikely to come back together in its former shape for the next project.

What drove the studio to such a step? Miscalculations in budget planning, a cooling market for licensed tactics games, an overheated industry.

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