The studio behind Star Wars Zero Company furloughed up to 80 percent of its staff in the lead up to the RPG’s launch, a Game File report reveals. That means affected staff are technically still employed by the company, but will receive no wage during the furlough period.
A representative from Bit Reactor confirmed the furloughs to Game File, though didn’t indicate how many employees are affected. The rep said uncertainty around the game’s launch performance was to blame for the furloughs, and that they were Bit Reactor’s decision and not EA or Disney’s.
Other sources claim up to 80% of the studio has been impacted. According to the Bit Reactor rep, it is hoped that furloughed workers will be brought back with full pay.
A former Bit Reactor staffer, Zachariah Scott, who was let go by the studio earlier this year, addressed the furloughs on LinkedIn yesterday. “It is sick and weird to have all of these EA and Disney folks as well as Bitreactor Senior staff making all of these 10/10 posts about Star Wars Zero Company being such a huge success and praising the work of the team while seemingly concealing the fact that the team was furloughed weeks ago,” Scott wrote.
He went on: “It is a gross but all too common sight to see, another corporate game hitting the top of Steam while the team is left looking for work and cut off from any possible profit sharing. It would be such a different story if they had been upfront about it earlier, and now it feels like they’re trying to keep the team in a holding pattern with good vibes and more empty promises.”
But reddit told me that you have to buy the games and piracy steals from these artists who worked so hard on the disney property game
I am left with no choice but to
Can’t even pretend you’re supporting developers when you buy corpo games.
Unironically pisses me off to no end how ungrateful porks are.
“No one owes you anything, sweaty!” was the ultimate invitation for people to revert to lizards, like it’s some profound philosophy….and why I hate weaponized therapy speak but that’s a rant for another day.
Another day, another Star Wars banger
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That means affected staff are technically still employed by the company, but will receive no wage during the furlough period.
Are they still working though? Because being forced to work but not getting paid sounds like a bad thing, someone should probably come up with a name for that.
No, having been furloughed you just stay home and don’t get paid
So it’s like being unemployed, but you’re not completely unemployed, so you don’t go looking for another job?
Ya basically if work picks back up you’re guaranteed a place, but if work dries up completely they’ll then make you redundant.
For us it was just scheduled and it was just welp stay home these weeks and you don’t get paid.
Really cool country
I’m planning on getting this, but was waiting for them to fix the PC performance. It sounds like they have a skeleton crew working on bugs but…
Seems like EA and Disney are screwing over the staff at Bitreactor so i won’t be purchasing or even trying this game.
I’ll probably pirate it at some point
Maybe by then it’ll have community mods to fix the performance issues
has anyone tried pressing capslock on the loading screen? that fixed xcom 2
Based on some of the stuff I’ve seen, doubt it’s that easy. Really seems unoptimized, which makes sense considering what they did to the staff
5 different pop ups demanding I engage with PC gamer newsletters and notifications BEFORE you can read anything. At least when PC gamer was a magazine the ads were for stuff you might actually want to buy.
Death to EA
