Quantic Dream Employees Strike to Save Star Wars: Eclipse From 115 Layoffs

There’s a quiet desperation brewing at Quantic Dream’s Paris headquarters. This week, a group of employees mounted a strike outside the building — not to demand better pay or shorter hours, but to protect something more fragile: the studio’s ability to finish the game they have been working on for years.

The target is Star Wars: Eclipse, a narrative-driven action game first revealed at the Game Awards in 2021. Development has been slow, hampered by persistent hiring difficulties. Then, in late 2025, the studio shipped a 3v3 MOBA called Chronicles of the Spellcaster — a pivot that did not work out. The game shut down last month, and Quantic Dream triggered what it called an “internal restructuring.”

In practice, that means layoffs. Up to 115 employees, primarily from the MOBA team, are at risk of losing their jobs. So some of them decided to fight back.

“I want to be clear — this is not an act of destruction,” said Jules, one of the employees who spoke to French outlet Gamekult during the protest. “We are trying to save Star Wars: Eclipse. Keep these 115 people, and we can finish the game and ship it. This is not overstaffing — the project actually needs this many people. Like a lot of companies in this industry, we have been understaffed for a long time. Management knows that our passion for games will eventually force us to crunch. The whole industry cannot keep running like this.”

The timing of the strike was deliberate. Thursday marked a visit from Lucasfilm executives, who were at the studio to check on Eclipse’s development progress. Employees wanted management to see firsthand: people who want to work, but have nothing to do.

“The way things stand now, with the current plan, the game simply cannot be completed,” said another employee, Theo. “We need these 115 people. But they have already been idle for a month — or nearly idle — which means we have lost a full month of development time. These people could have been trained on Eclipse’s tools. Right now, in my team, most people only come in once a week, just to see their colleagues, because there is no actual work left on Chronicles of the Spellcaster. We deliberately chose the day of the official visit to send our warning, hoping management would see with their own eyes: people who want to work, but have no work to do.”

The stakes are existential. Eclipse’s prospects were already described as precarious before this week. Adding to the uncertainty are rumors that NetEase is considering selling Quantic Dream. The Chinese tech giant bought the studio for €100 million (about $108 million) in 2023. If Lucasfilm is unwilling to fund the remaining development, Eclipse may never ship.

For the striking employees, the calculus is simple. Layoffs do not just cost jobs — they could kill the one project the studio was built to make.