Respawn lays off staff, cancels another unannounced game

Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment laid off several developers earlier this week, and canceled an unannounced, incubated project.

According to IGN, a “small” number of employees were let go as part of the project’s end. At least one of those exits was voluntary, but a former executive assistant (in a now-deleted LinkedIn post) revealed the project she’d been attached to since 2024 was gutted.

This project is believed to be a multiplayer shooter Respawn had been hiring for over the past year. It’s also the developer’s third project to be canceled in as many years. Respawn has multiple teams and has attempted to branch beyond Apex Legends and the Star Wars Jedi games, but both attempts were canceled by parent company EA.

The first was reportedly a single-player game set in the same universe as Titanfall and Apex Legends, codenamed ‘Titanfall Legends.’ EA canceled the project in 2023 during a weak financial quarter that year, and because its director Mohammad Alavi left the studio a year prior.

In 2024, Respawn canceled its second project, a single-player Star Wars action-FPS. Its demise came alongside the shuttering of Battlefield developer Ridgeline Games, and both were casualties of a 5 percent staff reduction across EA’s workforce.

Not much was known about this just-canceled project, but according to journalist Jeff Grubb, it was being handled by the team behind the Star Wars game. Respawn’s last major release was 2023’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which was ported to last-gen consoles in 2024.

Along with the third Jedi game, which will be the first entry without director Stig Asmussen at the helm, Respawn is helping develop a Star Wars strategy title. That project, developed by Bit Reactor, was unaffected by EA’s cuts back in 2024.