Luna Abyss should be enjoying the quiet after a solid launch right now. Instead, the people who made it are reportedly looking for work.
Wccftech reports that Kwalee Labs CEO Hollie Emery posted on LinkedIn that the entire Luna Abyss team has been made redundant. Emery wrote that the decision was "completely outside of our control" and that the team is available for work. The report says the affected list appears to include nine people, including Emery.
That is a small number compared with the mass layoffs players have watched roll through bigger publishers. It does not make the story smaller. In some ways it makes it sharper. This is not a faceless thousand-person cut buried inside an earnings call. It is a whole team, right after shipping a game that seemed to land with players and critics.
The timing hurts
Luna Abyss launched on May 21, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, with Xbox Game Pass availability giving it a real chance to find an audience. Steam currently lists the game as Very Positive, with 86 percent positive user reviews from 599 reviews at the time of writing. Pure Xbox's launch roundup also pointed to healthy early critical scores, including an 80 Metacritic average and 78 on OpenCritic.
Those numbers do not mean every player fell in love with it. They do suggest the game was not some failed curiosity everyone ignored. It had a clear pitch: first-person platforming, bullet hell combat, and a strange sci-fi prison-moon setting. Steam describes it as a single-player, story-driven action adventure about Fawkes, a prisoner sent into a derelict megastructure beneath Luna.
If you have Game Pass and like movement shooters, it is still an easy recommendation to sample. The important caveat is that trying the game now may feel bittersweet. You are not just checking out a stylish shooter. You are playing something from a team whose future, at least under this structure, appears to have been cut off almost immediately after release.
Good reception is not job security
This is the part of the industry that keeps feeling broken. Players are told to support interesting games. Critics cover them. Game Pass puts them in front of more people. Steam reviews come in positive. Then, sometimes, none of that is enough to keep the people who built the thing in their jobs.
Wccftech notes that Kwalee Labs was previously Bonsai Collective before a merger with publisher Kwalee and a rebrand. Emery's post, as quoted in the report, says the team was proud that Luna Abyss finally saw the light of day and grateful for the support it received. That makes the follow-up line about redundancies land even colder.
There is also a hard limit to what outsiders can responsibly say here. Kwalee had not replied to Wccftech's request for comment at publication time, and the company has not publicly laid out the business reasoning in a neat player-facing statement. So the safest wording is still "reported" and "according to Emery's post," not a grand theory about what happened behind closed doors.
What players can do now
If Luna Abyss was already on your backlog, this is probably the moment to stop letting it sink. It is on Xbox Game Pass, Steam, Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. The Steam page lists it at $29.99, with Steam Deck Verified status and a soundtrack DLC if you want to go further than a subscription install.
More importantly, players can keep the signal pointed at the people, not just the product. If affected developers share portfolios, job posts, or updates, boost those instead of turning the news into console-war mulch. Buying, reviewing, or recommending the game can help visibility, but it does not magically undo a redundancy decision. Nobody should pretend it does.
Luna Abyss now has the worst kind of second life: a good game attached to a rough industry story. Play it because it looks interesting. Talk about it because teams like this should not vanish quietly after doing the thing everyone claims they want from games: making something specific, strange, and worth remembering.
