Luna Abyss dev team laid off less than a month after launch

The entire team behind Luna Abyss, the bullet hell FPS from Kwalee Labs, has been laid off — just 26 days after the game launched on May 21.

Kwalee Labs CEO Hollie Emery announced the news on LinkedIn on June 16. "The entire team has been made redundant; a decision that was completely outside of our control," she wrote, adding that all nine developers are immediately available for hire and encouraging anyone with relevant contacts to share the post. Despite strong critical reception, the game's sales numbers tell a brutal story: SteamDB shows a peak concurrent player count of just 317, with only 43 players online at the time of reporting.

Luna Abyss blends bullet hell mechanics with first-person shooting — a genuinely rare combination that PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon praised as proof "the bullet hell FPS should be a thing," noting that putting the genre in first-person strips away the peripheral vision players rely on in games like Returnal, making familiar patterns feel completely new. The bullet hell genre has always been niche, but the first-person twist pushed it further into experimental territory, which likely didn't help with mainstream pickup.

The shutdown is another grim data point in an industry that keeps shedding jobs even as overall revenues hit record highs. A critically praised game, a small passionate team, and less than a month on shelves — it wasn't enough.