8/10 Reviews Couldn't Save Luna Abyss From Layoffs

A nine-person team spent years building a first-person bullet-hell shooter that critics liked, players rated 'very positive' on Steam, and reviewers scored as high as 8/10. None of it mattered. The entire development team at Kwalee Labs has been made redundant, according to Game Informer, just weeks after Luna Abyss launched on PC, PS5, and Xbox.

Kwalee Labs CEO Hollie Emery broke the news on LinkedIn, writing that the decision was "completely outside of our control" and that the entire team is now available for work immediately. Her post was equal parts proud and gutting: "We're enamoured by the love and support it received both by our industry and critically by journalists and media. Whilst we faced many challenges along the way, it has been the highlight of our careers."

Luna Abyss reviewed pretty well by any reasonable standard. It earned praise for its inventive level design, horror-tinged art direction, and satisfying bullet-hell combat. Push Square gave it an 8/10. Steam user reviews sit at 'very positive' after 599 ratings. Emery herself noted the game landed well "in a genre that is incredibly difficult to hit a good review score in." By every quality metric available, this was a success.

But the number that apparently decided everything was 317. That was Luna Abyss's all-time peak concurrent player count on Steam, reached 23 days after launch. No official sales figures have been shared, and the game also launched straight into Game Pass on Xbox, Cloud, and PC, which makes it harder to gauge commercial performance from Steam data alone. Still, a peak of 317 concurrent players paints a grim picture, and it's almost certainly why Kwalee pulled the plug.

May's Crowded Calendar

May 2026 was stacked. Multiple high-profile releases competed for attention and wallet space, and a small-team sci-fi shooter from a studio with no prior track record was always going to struggle for visibility in that environment. I wrote about this exact problem just recently with another game that peaked at similar numbers. The pattern is becoming depressingly familiar: small studio ships a good game, gets buried by the release calendar, and the team pays the price before the game even has time to find its audience through word of mouth or a sale.

What makes this one sting is how close Luna Abyss came to breaking through. The game has clear influences from Returnal, Nier, and Metroid Prime, and the people who actually played it seem to love it. An 8/10 and 'very positive' on Steam should be a foundation to build on, not a eulogy. I can't help but wonder whether a different launch window, or even a few more months of post-launch support and visibility, could have changed the outcome.

Kwalee, the UK-based publisher, is still prominently featuring Luna Abyss on its website. Emery's LinkedIn post included links to every affected team member's profile, effectively serving as a group job listing. If you're a studio looking for developers who can ship a well-reviewed game with a tiny team, that post is where to start. The game industry shed thousands of jobs over the past two years, and stories like this keep reinforcing an ugly truth: making something good is no longer enough to guarantee you'll still have a job when it ships.