Morning Save Point: Bit Reactor Lays Off Staff, Fortnite Odds Revealed

Monday morning, and the headlines run from a studio cutting jobs weeks after a million-copy launch to a London department store selling a £2,500 GTA 6 jacket. Epic published the odds Fortnite players have been shouting for, EVE Online’s next expansion lands tomorrow, and the week ahead is busier than today.

The big one

Bit Reactor has laid off an unspecified number of people, and the Star Wars Zero Company studio has not said how many. GamesIndustry.biz reported the cuts, and six employees confirmed them on LinkedIn, such as producer Michael Blackard and UI engineer Tyler Eichten. Each of them said November 6 was their last day at the Maryland studio. The report adds that Bit Reactor furloughed many of its workers before Zero Company launched on August 27 and started bringing people back in October.

The numbers around the game are the strange part. Zero Company, published by Electronic Arts, holds a score of 84 on Metacritic for the PC release. Video Game Insights estimates it has now sold 1.2 million units for roughly $52.2 million in revenue. Alinea Analytics put the September estimate at one million copies, with nearly 70% of sales on Steam. GamesIndustry.biz says it has asked Bit Reactor and EA for comment and had no answer by publication, so the headcount is the part nobody can confirm.

A million-copy launch is not supposed to be a crisis, which is exactly why this one is worth watching. Bit Reactor was founded just over four years ago in Maryland by former Firaxis art director Greg Foertsch, it was furloughing staff before the game shipped, and it is cutting jobs with a hit on its hands. So the support schedule is the thing to watch: the studio that just answered to a million players is the same one that has to keep patching and balancing the game for them.

Also happening

• Epic published the odds for Fortnite’s treasure chests. The Pirate Shop Access Token, the item that makes the Item Shop free for two weeks when you spend in-game currency, turns out to sit in one of every 137,500 chests. The rotating golden skin is rarer still at one in 1,562,500. Treasure Hours are the timed events when chest odds get boosted, and they have multiplied both, 1.5x for the first one and 2x for the second. Polygon has the full breakdown, including the last Treasure Hours before GTA 6 on November 14 and the season ending December 5.
• GTA 6 took over a floor of Selfridges. The London department store turned its Oxford Street Corner Shop into a GTA 6 takeover ahead of the November 19 release. The racks include an exclusive varsity jacket at £2,500, reportedly already sold out, a non-exclusive jacket at £1,750, and a Burger Shot range with a visor, work uniform and apron. Eurogamer walked the racks.
• Fractured Skies is EVE Online’s new expansion, and it arrives tomorrow, November 10. It overhauls low-security space PvP with a seasonal faction conflict that ends in a scheduled battle, the first one set for February. It also lands with paid 24/7 alpha access to the companion FPS Vanguard. EVE design director Greg Hennessey told PC Gamer: “I can roll up with whatever I have and go shoot some structures and have a big fight.”
• Path of Exile 2’s full release lands December 11. Grinding Gear Games detailed the 1.0 package at ExileCon on November 6: the Shadow class, which is built around staying unseen, Acts 5 and 6, and a new endgame league. We have the full breakdown.
• PlayStation’s Black Friday discounts are already running. Up to 75% off opened on November 4 and runs through November 30, with new titles joining on November 16 and some deals ending on November 20. Our breakdown has the schedule and the timing.

Out today

Only a couple of things land on Monday. Hozy, the cozy home-restoration game with no timers and no scores, is out today on PS5 and Xbox, according to PlayStation Blog and Xbox Wire’s week-ahead list. DREADMOOR opens on Steam in Early Access at 8:00 a.m. ET at $19.99, and we have the unlock time and regional prices.

Several of those arrive with a Game Pass subscription, such as Football Manager 27 and Warhammer Survivors.

Deal of the day

PEAK is 38% off at $4.95 on Steam, down from $7.99, and the discount runs through November 15. It is a co-op climbing game about a group of lost nature scouts trying to scale a mountain and get rescued, so five dollars buys a whole evening of very loud panic with friends.

One more thing

BioWare made a Mass Effect 2 trailer that nobody outside the studio ever saw. Its lead animator, Jonathan Cooper, posted the pre-alpha reel on his own account on November 7. His note read: “A very pre-alpha internal trailer intended to highlight the cinematics we were creating in Montreal.” The reel dates from April 2009, and the faces are the average of every customization slider in Maya. Miranda, Garrus and Jack are all clearly visible before an action-movie monologue from the Commander. The soundtrack is Melodrone’s “C’mon Try A Little Bit”, which has 64,000 plays on YouTube and appears in none of the original marketing.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report