Quantic Dream's Own Developers Are Striking to Save Star Wars Eclipse

Quantic Dream is planning to cut 115 jobs, about a third of the studio. The people building its Star Wars game walked off the job to argue that the math does not work, and they picked the day Lucasfilm came to visit.

Workers at the Paris studio behind Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human held a one-day strike on June 25, organized by the STJV, France's video game workers' union. Lucasfilm representatives were at the studio that same day to check on the progress of Star Wars Eclipse, the open-world game Quantic Dream announced at The Game Awards in December 2021. The timing was the point. The striking employees wanted the license holder to see an office full of people who want to work and are not being kept on to do it.

What the cuts are, and where they came from

The layoff plan covers 115 roles. Quantic Dream says the cuts mostly fall on the team behind Spellcasters Chronicles, a live-service MOBA the studio shipped on February 26 after years in development. That game was shut down on May 20, barely three months later, after it failed to hold a player base. Reporting on the closure traces the call back to NetEase, the Chinese company that acquired Quantic Dream in 2022.

So the chain is straightforward. A live-service bet did not work, the owner pulled the plug, and the bill is landing on the studio's headcount. That is the same pattern that has run through the industry for two years now. What makes this one different is the second claim the workers are making on top of fighting for their jobs: that the cuts will take down the project the studio is supposedly built around.

The argument the developers are making

The strikers say their skills carry directly over to Eclipse, and that the game is understaffed, not overstaffed.

"We believe that, as things stand, the game literally cannot be finished if the redundancy plan is implemented as currently scheduled," a developer identified as Théo told the French outlet Gamekult. He added that the studio needs "the 115 people who have been inactive (or almost) for a month already," and called that a month of lost production that could have gone toward training people on Eclipse's tools.

Another developer, Jules, took on the obvious accusation head-on. "It's far from being an act of sabotage. On the contrary, we're trying to save Star Wars Eclipse," he told Gamekult. He described a studio that is understaffed by design, betting that passion and crunch will get the game out the door anyway, and said that is not a sustainable way to run the business.

It is worth being precise about what is verified here and what is the workers' position. The 115-job figure and the strike are confirmed across multiple outlets. The claim that Eclipse cannot ship without those specific people is the developers' argument, made publicly, and Quantic Dream has not conceded it.

Eclipse has been quiet for a long time

Some context on the game at the center of this. Eclipse was revealed with a cinematic trailer almost five years ago and has shown no gameplay since. Reports over the years have described shifting direction and a scope that kept growing. Studio founder David Cage has called the project ambitious and, writing last fall, said "development of Star Wars: Eclipse continues, and we are eager to share more with you in the future." No release window has been confirmed, and outside reporting puts it years out.

Neither Lucasfilm nor Disney has commented on the labor dispute. NetEase has not publicly responded to the walkout. Workers have told reporters they cannot communicate with NetEase directly, which means every negotiation runs through local management that may not have the authority to change the decision.

The bigger fight behind it

The Quantic Dream walkout is one piece of a wider campaign the STJV is calling "Summer Grève Fest" (grève is French for strike). The union says more than 1,000 jobs have been cut across the French games industry since May. Its broader demand is aimed at the government: France runs a tax credit for video game production, the Crédit d'Impôt Jeux Vidéo, and the union argues public money should not be subsidizing studios that lay off staff the moment a title underperforms.

That is the part worth watching past the Star Wars headline. A single studio's strike rarely reverses a layoff plan, and NetEase's record at other studios it owns does not suggest it will here. But a union tying these cuts to public subsidies is a fight that reaches well beyond one Paris office.

For now, the 115 layoffs are still scheduled. The developers who say they are the only ones who can finish Eclipse may not be there to do it. And whatever Lucasfilm saw on its visit, the studio is not saying.