Summary
An upper-ranking team member at Respawn Entertainment, developer ofStar Wars Jedi: Survivor, has complained recently about the company’s drop in morale in the wake of a game cancellation and studio closure by Respawn’s parent company, EA. Respawn employees are currently working on a sequel toStar Wars Jedi: Survivor, which will be the third in the game series, and fans are hoping the downward morale shift won’t affect that game’s quality.
EA acquired Respawn Entertainmentin December 2017, at a time when the developer was fully focused on theTitanfallfranchise. Since the acquisition, Respawn has headed the celebratedStar Wars Jediaction-adventure series and has also been responsible for the successful battle royale hero shooterApex Legends, which launched in 2019 and continues to see peak player counts of around 200,000 in 2025.
Earlier this week,EA canceled its plannedBlack Panthergameand shut down its developer, Cliffhanger Games, in a round of layoffs that is reported to have affected fewer than 300 employees. Word of the cancellation and studio closure reached Patrick Wren, senior encounter designer at Respawn Entertainment, who responded to the events on Bluesky by stating simply that morale has reached an “all-time low.” In anunattached postto his own Bluesky page, Wren said, “I am just sorry for everyone who just wants to make cool video games in this industry.” He later confirmed the subject matter of that post was related to EA’s closure of Cliffhanger Games.
Respawn Entertainment’s Morale is Reportedly Bottoming Out
While Wren’s recent post showed sympathy for the former employees of a now-defunct sister developer,Respawn Entertainment suffered layoffsof its own earlier this year. Reports on that round of job cuts, which occurred in late April, estimate that roughly 100 employees were let go following the cancellation of two different video game projects. Both games were reportedly quite early in their development and had not yet been announced, but one appears to have been planned as a multiplayer first-person-shooter, and details are even more scarce on the other canceled project.
Despite EA’s recent layoffs at multiple developers, anupdate on the nextStar Wars Jedigame, revealed just after news broke about the late-April layoffs, confirmed that Respawn is still working on it. A Twitter post that seemed intended to quell fears about the developer’s future included just one sentence regarding the upcoming game, stating that it would “raise the bar again for storytelling and gameplay.” The same post showed promise forApex Legends' future, forecasting creative new seasons and an expansion of its in-game systems.
