Employees at Reflector Entertainment, the Montreal studio that recently released the third-person action-adventure game Unknown 9: Awakening, have been affected by layoffs, according to a number of employees who made the cuts public on social media. The studio is owned by Bandai Namco and released the game about a month ago. The exact number of people out of work is unknown because Reflector has not made a public statement on the matter. But those affected include people working in art, design, user interface, lighting and storytelling.
The layoffs were noticed by Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach on Bluesky. Indeed, a glance at LinkedIn shows several gaming employees announcing that they are looking for a recent job. Some of the ones I’ve seen include: 3D Modeler, Character Artist, UI Developer, Community Manager, Lighting Expert, Game Designer, Narrative Designer, and Senior Environment Artist. This range of roles suggests that layoffs are widespread and affect all departments. We asked Reflector Entertainment for more information about the layoffs.
Unknown 9 takes place in an alternate history where you play as a “Questor” with special abilities, traveling the world to fight a mysterious secret society. Bandai Namco liked it enough to buy the studio in 2020, and enough has been invested globally to produce two novels, a scripted podcast, and a comic book. Based on these layoffs, it is unclear whether the fictional world itself is also being retired or whether Bandai Namco intends to continue it.
To the real people affected, this looks like further brutal cost cutting by Bandai Namco that has recently taken place wasting work in their Japanese studies (with a very unpleasant if method Bloomberg reports are right). They also canceled several games earlier this year due to “higher than expected” development costs.
As for Unknown 9 itself, the game appears to have sold quite poorly and currently has an average “mixed” rating on Steam. He was likely under-marketed due to the gamble of his production values. We saw a 90-second trailer in 2020 and didn’t hear anything else about the game until earlier this year, when it resurfaced with a mix of Tomb Raider adventures, Assassin’s Creed conspiracy theories, and Star Wars force powers.
Former RPS editor Katharine Castle continues to gain a reputation as a hell prophet after watching a preview of the game earlier this year and speaking with the studio’s head of production Jean-Francois Deschamps. During which she suspected that the final months of development of the game would be a challenge.
Ultimately, this is a “really exciting” challenge to tackle as a studio, [Deschamps] tells us, although given everything that’s happened in the industry over the last 12 months, with studios gigantic and tiny having to downsize or shut down entirely after failing to recoup development costs, I’m concerned about how long it will take it’s thrilling when Unknown 9 debuts later this summer.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s probably because something similar recently happened in the multiplayer shooter Concord. After a financially disastrous launch, the studio responsible for the game was unceremoniously shut down by parent company Sony earlier this month. Once again, the overexcitement of gigantic companies affects employees the most.
