One Month After Launch, Last Flag Studio Axes Half Its Staff

Thirty-seven days. That's how long it took for Last Flag to go from launch to layoffs.

Night Street Games, the indie studio co-founded by Imagine Dragons manager Mac Reynolds and lead singer Dan Reynolds, has laid off "about a dozen employees" following the underperformance of its CTF shooter Last Flag, which launched on April 14. Executive producer Jonathan Jelinek first shared the news via LinkedIn, confirming the game didn't achieve the "financial success" the team anticipated. In a statement provided to Game Developer, Mac Reynolds said 13 developers remain at the studio.

The speed of this collapse is brutal, even by 2026 standards. Last Flag carries a Mostly Positive rating on Steam from 475 reviews, and Jelinek himself noted it was a "very smooth launch from a technical perspective." None of that mattered. By May 1, Night Street had already acknowledged the player count wasn't where it needed to be, making the game free to play every weekend in a last-ditch effort to build an audience. A week later, they pulled the plug on future development beyond already-planned patches. I keep coming back to that timeline: a technically solid, well-reviewed game that couldn't find players, and a studio that went from shipping to shrinking in barely a month. It's a grim snapshot of how unforgiving the multiplayer shooter market has become.

"Our team poured everything into bringing Last Flag to life, and I'm proud of what we built together," Reynolds said. "Game development is an inherently risky business, and it's not lost on us what it means to take a chance on something you believe in." The studio plans to honor its commitments to existing players by rolling out new characters, maps, a new game mode, cosmetics, and custom lobby hosting before stepping back. After that, the remaining 13 developers will shift focus to new game ideas.

Night Street joins a growing list of studios hit by layoffs in May alone, alongside Metacore, 2K, MercurySteam, and Survios. Veteran RPG developer Tim Cain addressed the broader crisis in a recent YouTube video, arguing that while the current wave of layoffs is serious, it still doesn't match the devastation of the 1983 crash. Whether or not that comparison holds, it's cold comfort for the dozen people at Night Street who just lost their jobs over a game that, by most accounts, was actually pretty good.