Quantic Dream Strike & Layoffs Put Star Wars Eclipse at Risk

If you've been keeping tabs on Star Wars Eclipse, the action-adventure game that Quantic Dream announced back in 2021, you might want to brace yourself. Things are not looking good, and the mess surrounding this project goes a lot deeper than a simple development delay.

The world got its first look at Star Wars Eclipse at The Game Awards in 2021, courtesy of a CG concept trailer from Quantic Dream. There was no gameplay involved, no concrete plans shown; it was essentially a vibe trailer and nothing else. Five years later, the game has said almost nothing, and that kind of silence rarely means good things.

Quantic Dream is the studio behind Detroit: Become Human, Heavy Rain, and Beyond: Two Souls, all heavily narrative-driven games built around dialogue choices and branching storylines. Think Telltale-style storytelling. Star Wars Eclipse was reportedly going to lean more into action-adventure territory, which would have been a bit of a shift for them.

The game was also set during the High Republic era, which is genuinely one of the more exciting corners of the Star Wars universe.

The concept itself had potential. What makes Star Wars: The Eclipse even messier to talk about is the studio behind it. Quantic Dream is led by David Cage, and earlier this year, the studio released a mobile game called Spellcasters Chronicles in early access. It peaked at around 800 players on Steam before being announced for shutdown in June.

Off the back of that failure, Quantic Dream management started looking at cutting roughly 115 staff members, which is about 25% of the entire studio. Here's where things get interesting. On June 25th, French gaming outlet Gamekult reported that Quantic Dream developers went on strike. They timed it deliberately; that was the exact day Lucasfilm representatives were scheduled to visit the studio to check in on Star Wars Eclipse.

One developer was quoted explaining that the strike wasn't an act of sabotage but actually an attempt to save Star Wars Eclipse. The argument was that those 115 people facing layoffs should be redirected to the game rather than let go, especially since the team working on Star Wars Eclipse was already understaffed and being pushed through mandatory crunch overtime.

That crunch culture, by the way, isn't new at Quantic Dream. Back in 2018, reports surfaced about deeply troubling conditions at the studio, a toxic workplace culture encouraged by Cage and other management, with allegations of sexist and racist behavior, 15 to 35 hours of forced overtime per week, and reported violations of French labor law. At one point, the entire IT department reportedly walked out.

There were also quotes attributed to Cage making derogatory comments about women, both in the context of his games and his audience.

Cage and others at the studio denied these claims, but the reports were out there, and they stuck. When Star Wars Eclipse was first announced, a chunk of Star Wars fans immediately called on Lucasfilm to walk away from the deal with Quantic Dream precisely because of all this. That pushback didn't seem to go anywhere.

In 2022, Quantic Dream was acquired by NetEase, the Chinese company behind Marvel Rivals, though NetEase largely left them to operate independently. Whether NetEase steps in now to pump more funding into Star Wars Eclipse or whether the whole thing quietly collapses remains to be seen.

Star Wars Eclipse sits in a gaming industry that is genuinely struggling right now. XBOX and Sony are both running layoffs. Bungie got gutted. Studios like Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, and Double Fine are all reportedly on the chopping block at XBOX. Hardware prices are climbing instead of dropping. It's a rough time all around, and Star Wars Eclipse is just one casualty of a much bigger systemic problem.

Where Star Wars Eclipse lands from here is genuinely unclear. Either NetEase steps up with serious financial backing, Lucasfilm decides to pull the plug or hand the project off to a different studio, or the game limps forward in increasingly dire circumstances. For now, Star Wars Eclipse is very much in wait-and-see territory, and honestly, given everything surrounding it, not everyone is going to be heartbroken if it never comes out.