Star Wars Zero Company landed last week with the kind of reviews a new Star Wars tactics game was not expected to get. Bit Reactor, the Maryland studio that made it, had already sent most of that team home without pay before it arrived.
A studio representative confirmed the furloughs to reporters this week. The call was Bit Reactor's, not Electronic Arts and not Disney. It happened before anyone knew how launch week would go. The same person called it a difficult decision. The studio had burned through most of its money on the way to its first release.
How many people got cut from payroll is the part the company would not put a number on. An August 12 filing in a 2024 lawsuit between the founders says Bit Reactor "has furloughed most of its employees and terminated contractors." One person close to the studio put the hit at about 80 percent of the team. Another described a skeleton crew left on the clock to chase post-launch bugs on PS5, Xbox Series, and PC.
Furlough is not a layoff on paper. The workers are still employees. They are not getting paid. Bit Reactor says it hopes a strong launch puts those people back on salary. People who actually got the notice are less sure the old seats will still be there if the studio starts hiring again.
Zachariah Scott, a senior technical artist who was at Bit Reactor from early 2023 until a messy exit in May, posted that the studio had been hiding the furloughs for weeks while launch posts kept thanking the team. He later said he had talked to nearly a dozen workers over the weekend. "Everybody has essentially the same story, which is, 'Yeah, I got furloughed three weeks ago.'" Scott also said budgets were tight while he was there, and that studio head Greg Foertsch talked often about needing another game deal to keep the lights on.
Zero Company shipped August 27. It is a squad tactics game in the same family as XCOM, built with help from Respawn Entertainment. Early coverage of the court file says the pitch that got EA's attention started closer to one of Respawn's non-Star Wars franchises and got steered into Star Wars. Critics preferred it to the long run of recent Star Wars games. On Steam it opened at or near the top of the seller list. The people who made the missions were already off payroll when those charts updated.
The furloughs spilled into public view because the founders are in court. Alison Kelly, Bit Reactor's chief operating officer until 2024, sued in July 2024. She says Foertsch pushed her out. She filed first in federal court, then refiled in Maryland's Baltimore County. The claims are breach of contract and unjust enrichment. She wants more than $20 million, on the argument that the studio was worth more than double that.
The fight underneath the money is ownership. Kelly says she was a co-owner. Foertsch's side says she was never an owner and that the company is his. Kelly has pointed to a draft operating agreement from April 2021 that would have split shares among Foertsch, Kelly, and early co-founder Tom Whittaker. Whittaker and another early name, Steve Meyer, later left. Foertsch's lawyers say that draft was never signed. They have also attacked Kelly's job performance. She denies that. She has said she was frozen out of meetings, locked out of tools, denied the books, and wrongly fired while Foertsch took financial benefits for himself. Those are her allegations. They have not been tried.
A June trial date came and went. The case is now pointed at early 2027. Both sides are still taking depositions and adding filings. The August 12 paper is what put the word "furloughed" into a public docket.
Bit Reactor started in 2021. Foertsch came out of Firaxis, where he was art director on XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2. The studio sold itself as the tactics shop that could do Star Wars without turning it into another third-person action sequel. Zero Company is the proof of that pitch and the bill for it. A first-game studio that runs out of cash three weeks before ship is a studio that bet the payroll on review scores and opening-week Steam rank.
EA published the game. Disney holds the license. Neither ordered the furloughs, according to Bit Reactor. That leaves the studio holding both the hit and the hole in the bank account. A publisher deal can fund production and still leave the developer responsible for its own headcount when the milestone money stops. Scott's version is that Foertsch was already hunting the next contract while this one was finishing.
Whether launch week sales refill the account is the only number that matters to the people on furlough. Strong reviews do not automatically reopen the office. A skeleton crew can patch a tactics game for a while. It cannot run live support, DLC, or a second project at the scale Zero Company just proved the team can hit.
Kelly's suit and Foertsch's defense will sit in Baltimore County into 2027. The game is out now. Most of the credits list is unpaid now. The studio says it wants those people back. The workers Scott talked to are waiting to see if "furlough" turns into a return date or a quiet ending.
Should Bit Reactor bring the full Zero Company team back on pay before it talks about a second game? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.