Reflector Declares Unknown 9: Awakening a "Failure," Announces Layoffs

Among the many high-profile AAA flops of 2024 – such as Star Wars Outlaws, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Skull and Bones, and many others – one particular fiasco, Unknown 9: Awakening, lived up to its name by remaining largely unknown within the gaming community, launching and fizzling out to little fuss compared to other titles. Recently, Hervé Hoerdt, CEO of the game's developer Reflector Entertainment, issued a public statement addressing its underperformance, declaring Unknown 9: Awakening a "failure" and announcing the termination of their planned project set in the same universe.

For those unaware, Unknown 9: Awakening was originally envisioned as just one entry in a "rich transmedia universe" spanning games, novels, comics, podcasts, and other mediums. Walking the walk and executing this vision, however, was where Reflector struggled, with the game's marketing campaign being so dismal that not many people even heard about Unknown 9, and the game itself offering very little in terms of enjoyment, currently holding a mind-boggling 0.9/10 rating on Metacritic and a peak of just 285 concurrent players on SteamDB.

As a result, the studio has canceled its planned project that would have continued the series, citing "the failure of the studio's ambitious and courageous new project," referring to Unknown 9: Awakening, as the main reason. "The performance of the release didn't come near the company expectations, after numerous timeline adjustments and investments, both financially and other, and didn't warrant any further exploration in the universe," Hoerdt wrote in his statement.

Instead, Reflector's developers will now focus on a new project based on an existing IP from Bandai Namco, which, according to the CEO, "is shaping up very well." Sadly, the cancellation of future Unknown 9 projects also led to job cuts, with Hoerdt confirming that "there will be redundancies" and promising to provide both financial and emotional support to the affected developers.

Interestingly, this isn't the first round of layoffs at Reflector, as the studio had already undergone a round of job cuts in November 2024, a month after Unknown 9: Awakening's launch, affecting nearly 20% of its workforce. The layoffs were confirmed by General Manager Marc-André Séguin in a blog post that has since been deleted for an unknown reason, though you can still read it in full over here. At the moment, the number of developers fired due to the collapse of the Unknown 9 universe has not been disclosed.

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