Kwalee lays off entire Luna Abyss team weeks after the game’s release

Another deluge of layoffs in a year full of them.

Kwalee Labs is gone.Kwalee Labs, the development team behind the recently released Luna Abyss, has just been made redundant.The team was only made up of nine people, but all of them suddenly find themselves out of work despite launching the aforementioned game, which has been received very well by critics and players.Read the full article on pushsquare.com

May was a remarkably busy month for high-profile game releases, which could explain why Luna Abyss' launch went relatively unnoticed on PC and current-gen consoles. It's a sci-fi bullet-hell shooter that seemed to review pretty well, but despite that, the entire development team at Kwalee Labs has been laid off. Read more

Late last month, Kwalee Labs launched its first-person horror shooter Luna Abyss on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC. But not even a day-one Game Pass release was apparently enough to save the jobs of the team that made Luna Abyss. Kwalee Labs CEO and production director Hollie Emery announced on her LinkedIn page that she and the other eight members of Luna Abyss's development team were laid off earlier this week for undisclosed reasons. "Unfortunately as of yesterday, the entire team has been made redundant; a decision that was completely outside of our control," wrote Emery. "As a result, the entire team are available for work as of today." Emery also stated that she and the rest of her team were "enamoured by the love and support it received both by our industry and critically by journalists and media. Whilst we faced many challenges along the way, it has been the highlight of our careers--and we are incredibly proud that it has finally seen the light of day." According GameSpot's sister site Metacritic, Luna Abyss had an 81% score and was largely received well by critics. While the title's Game Pass numbers aren't available, its peak concurrent players on Steam was 18,597 near launch. However, its most recent 24-hour peak was only 310 players, which marks a dramatic drop-off. Luna Abyss puts players in control of Fawkes, a woman who has been imprisoned on a moon called Luna and tasked to excavate and explore the deep passages beneath the surface while monitored by her A.I. prison guard, Aylin. As Fawkes uncovers the secrets of Luna, she's forced to fight for her life against cosmic horrors that defy description. Presumably Luna Abyss will remain available on its current platforms. The layoffs of Kwalee Labs' developers comes at a time when even prominent first-party studios at Xbox are currently negotiating with Microsoft to avoid being shut down. The final fate of those studios is currently unclear.

Last month, publisher Kwalee released their first game made in house as part of their studio Kwalee Labs, Luna Abyss, a first-person bullet-hell platforming adventure game about a prisoner exploring a derelict megastructure. Now, it appears that the entire team that made the game has been laid off. Read more