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Star Wars Zero Company draws acclaim but may stay broken after Bit Reactor furlough

Star Wars Zero Company earned strong reviews but launched with widespread technical problems, and developer Bit Reactor has furloughed most of its staff, leaving the game's future uncertain, Engadget reports.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-03 05:02

Engadget described persistent traversal stutter and mouse-and-keyboard input lag on a PC with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, RTX 5060 Ti, and 16GB of RAM. It said even owners of more powerful cards such as the RTX 5090 reported poor performance. The game has a "mostly positive" rating on Steam across nearly 9,000 reviews, but almost every review mentions stuttering, crashes or game-breaking bugs. One negative review begins: "Started off having a great time. Then came the crashes." Engadget also noted similar reports from console players.

The report compared the situation with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, another EA-published Unreal Engine 5 game that was plagued by traversal and shader stutter on PC at launch and still stutters after several major patches from Respawn. Unlike Respawn, Bit Reactor is not an EA subsidiary, so post-release support depends on how Zero Company sells.

Game File's Stephen Totilo reported that Bit Reactor had furloughed most of its staff just weeks before Zero Company's release. Sources told Totilo that as much as 80 percent of employees were not being paid and only a skeleton crew remained "ready to address any of Zero Company's post-launch bugs." A Bit Reactor spokesperson said the studio hoped to bring furloughed workers back with restored pay, but employees who spoke to Totilo said they were not confident the studio could do that even if the game was a commercial success. Bit Reactor's co-founders are also in a legal dispute not scheduled for trial until early 2027.

On launch day, Bit Reactor said on Steam it was aware of "emerging issues (crashes and CPU threading)" and was working on fixes. Engadget noted that the statement came before the furlough report and that Bit Reactor has not said anything since. EA and Bit Reactor did not immediately respond to Engadget's request for comment about what post-release support, if any, would be provided. Engadget also cited Cold Symmetry's announcement of a "Week One" update for Mortal Shell II as a contrast, while noting that Respawn, with EA's full support, took about a year and a half to get Jedi: Survivor to its current state.