A month after the release of his debut game Unknown 9: AwakeningBandai Namco-owned Reflector Entertainment announced that it is laying off 18% of its employees in order to “effectively pursue our most pressing goals while ensuring that each member of our team can contribute significantly to our ongoing projects.”
Reflector stated that the layoffs were not due to “commercial success or external pressures”, but simply the fact that there is currently not enough work to sustain the studio at its current size.
“With the recent release of Unknown 9: Awakening and our two key production lines entering the early stages of development, we must ensure that our employees are focused on contributing to projects that take full advantage of their skills,” CEO Marc -André Seguin he wrote (By Game creator). “As a result, we are reducing our team by approximately 18% of our total Reflector workforce, which impacts individuals who are not assigned to the roles our active projects require.”
Unknown 9: Awakening didn’t make a particularly good impression when it released in October. We liked what we saw pre-release preview good enough, but currently has a “mixed” rating Coupleespecially the all-time high number of simultaneous players there were only 285 on the platform, and this number quickly reached double digits. We don’t have access to player numbers on consoles, but critically it didn’t fare any better on other platforms, maintaining a not-so-great overall score of 59% on Metacritical.
The actual number of people laid off from their jobs was not reported, but Reflector reports LinkedIn the site says it has 51-200 employees and 145 “associate members” — that is, LinkedIn users who list Reflector as their current place of work.
