There was undoubtedly a hope in the gaming space, both with the developers and the gamer base, that 2025 would be a much better year for the industry regarding layoffs and canceled games that had been in the works for a long time. Sadly, the year is only a week old, and we’ve already had multiple layoff announcements. Today, Splash Damage added to this by revealing that its multiplayer title, Transformers Reactivate, has been canceled, and in a message on Twitter, the team revealed that they might be facing layoffs due to the “scaling down” they’ll have to do because of this shelving.
Obviously, this is a huge blow. This is not just for those who had been hoping for an update on the multiplayer title but also for the company itself, which thanked Hasbro and all who worked on the game with them for being “supportive” during the endeavor. Transformers Reactivate was meant to be a new take on the franchise, where the Autobots and Decepticons would work together to save Earth from a threat that could doom them all if not taken care of. The teaser trailer that was shown during The Game Awards 2022 hinted at how the humans would be involved in the endeavor and highlighted the massive battles to come. Yet, it was not to be.
There’s much to process here, and fans themselves have been sympathetic to what happened to Splash Damage, but they also weren’t entirely surprised that this has happened to them. That might sound harsh, but when you think about it, there have been multiple trends at The Game Awards over the last several years, and one of them was going and announcing projects that were YEARS away from completion and were nothing more than “visual teasers” to show what was coming. There was a time when that was fine, but as companies like Bethesda, Square Enix, and even Nintendo have learned the hard way, if you don’t show something soon after that teaser, fans will get anxious and wonder if the game was canceled.
Sadly, we can think about multiple titles right now that were shown off at things like The Game Awards that haven’t been heard from since their announcements, and likely won’t be heard about for some time. A title featuring Wonder Woman comes to mind, or a new game set in a galaxy far, far away.
If things don’t change, news like this will continue, and no one wants that.
