Quantic Dream Workers Go on Strike to Save Star Wars Eclipse as 115 Layoffs Threaten the Project

Quantic Dream has been sitting on Star Wars Eclipse for years, showing almost nothing while the rest of the industry shipped games, got canceled, or laid people off. Now all three of those things are converging at the Paris studio at once, and the developers who are actually building the game have decided to act. On June 26 and 27, 2026, Quantic Dream employees staged a strike outside the office to protest a plan to cut 115 workers. Their message is direct: fire those people and Star Wars Eclipse might not survive.

The Strike and What It Is Really About

The 115 workers targeted by the redundancy plan are mostly from the team that made Spellcasters Chronicles, the live-service MOBA that Quantic Dream launched and then shut down in May 2026 after it flopped. Management's position appears to be that those developers are expendable since their project is dead. But striking workers told French outlet Gamekult that this logic is badly wrong. Developer Jules said the studio is already understaffed on Star Wars Eclipse, and cutting those 115 people would make a hard situation impossible. 'We could manage to release it with 115 additional people, and that would not be overstaffed: it is what is needed. We are understaffed, like in many other companies in the sector, because bosses know very well that passion will lead people to crunch time and that games will eventually be released. But it is impossible to run a sustainable industry like that,' Jules told Gamekult.

Developer Theo added a pointed claim about how management is operating: he believes Quantic Dream is hiding certain decisions from the staff out of embarrassment, specifically things that NetEase may have requested that could help Star Wars Eclipse but that management is refusing because it would require cutting content. That is a serious accusation. It suggests the problems here go beyond headcount and into dysfunction at the decision-making level.

The Lucasfilm Visit and What Was at Stake

The timing of the strike was deliberate. According to Gamekult, Lucasfilm sent representatives to Quantic Dream this week to review the status of Star Wars Eclipse. The workers timed their strike to coincide with that visit. Walking out while Lucasfilm executives are in the building is a calculated escalation, not an accident. The developers want the IP holder to understand that the project is in genuine danger, not just running behind schedule. And given how little has been shown publicly since the cinematic reveal at The Game Awards in December 2021, calling it 'behind schedule' would be generous even without a staffing fight on top of it.

How Quantic Dream Got Into This Position

The studio bet on Spellcasters Chronicles as a revenue source that would bankroll Star Wars Eclipse's ongoing development. That bet failed. Insider Gaming reported in May 2026 that Quantic Dream had been counting on live-service revenue from Spellcasters Chronicles to fund the Star Wars project. When the MOBA flopped and was discontinued, the financial picture changed significantly. The studio, acquired by Chinese tech company NetEase for around 100 million euros, now faces pressure from above while its developers push back from below. David Cage said last fall that development of Star Wars Eclipse continues and that the studio is eager to share more. That statement has not aged well.

What makes this harder to watch is that Star Wars Eclipse was positioned as one of the most ambitious Star Wars games in years. The reveal trailer showed a new era of the Star Wars timeline, the High Republic period, with a tone aimed squarely at the prestige narrative game market that Quantic Dream built with Detroit: Become Human and Heavy Rain. Ambitious trailers and finished games are very different things, and that gap tends to widen when a studio is fighting over who gets laid off rather than building the actual product.

Community Reaction

The news hit hard on social media. A Pirat_Nation post summarizing the situation pulled over 1 million likes, with the framing that 'Star Wars Eclipse is dying' cutting straight through the noise. KAMI and MBG both pointed to the Lucasfilm visit as the most alarming detail, since it means the IP holder is now aware of the internal collapse in real time. The reaction across the board was bleak. Nobody was arguing that things are under control. The question most people are asking is whether the game exists in a form worth saving after years of slow development and a failed live-service detour. Multiple outlets including Kotaku, Insider Gaming, and VGC confirmed the core facts from Gamekult's original report, with fewer than three independent reactions from developers in quotes, so the picture inside the studio remains limited but consistent.

CriticalPixel Take

The 'Spellcasters Chronicles revenue funds Eclipse' plan was a bad structure that is now producing predictable damage. You do not build a live-service MOBA on a volatile market and then bet your Star Wars game on it succeeding. What Quantic Dream has done is tie its entire future to one high-risk project, watch it fail, and then try to fire the people who built it rather than pivot them to the project that actually matters. The developers on the picket line are right. You do not fix an understaffed ambitious game by removing 115 people. Management is wrong here.

Whether Lucasfilm will put pressure on Quantic Dream to protect headcount is the question now. Disney and Lucasfilm have a direct stake in Star Wars Eclipse existing and being good. A cinematic narrative Star Wars RPG from a studio that has made some of the most emotionally effective interactive stories of the last decade is exactly the kind of project that raises the franchise's gaming profile. If it collapses, it would be another high-profile failure for a Star Wars gaming slate that has relied almost entirely on Respawn Entertainment to keep its credibility intact. Quantic Dream has a short window to show Lucasfilm something worth protecting. That window just got a lot more visible.