After the well-received announcement, I reported that sources familiar with Quantic Dream’s plans had said that the title was a minimum of at least 3-4 years away. So why was the game announced so early? It’s a strategy that we’re increasingly seeing become more common in the industry, with several studios including Bethesda (Elder Scrolls), Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto), and Electronic Arts (Star Wars IPs) all making game announcements years before the titles would be released. The main reason that this strategy has become more prevalent in recent years is because of the huge amount of competition to secure developer talent. On top of this, Quantic Dream has also suffered from a series of allegations surrounding workplace issues these past couple of years, including sexual harassment allegations and a toxic work culture. This would presumably make the studio even less attractive to work at in the face of all the competition to attract staff. However, sources close to Quantic Dream have told me that even though the trailer was released to an extremely favourable reception from the wider gaming community - and it certainly does look stunning - it has not had the desired effect of attracting developer talent to the studio. As a result, Star Wars Eclipse is likely going to be released around 2027-2028. What’s more, hard evidence of Quantic Dream’s difficulties in hiring new employees and the resulting 2027-2028 release window can also be found online. Looking at my previous tweets above, I mentioned that Quantic Dream had more than 60 job openings in France. Fast forwarding to today, three months following the game’s announcement, that is still the case with 67 jobs available in Paris. However, upon further investigation by Xfire, we discovered that Quantic Dream has been manually updating the “published on” date shown on each of the job advertisements, in order to make them appear more recent. As of today, the oldest “publiée le” (published on) date for a Quantic Dream job vacancy listing is the start of February 2022. However, using the digital internet archive tool Archive.org, Xfire was able to verify that the exact same positions, on the exact same URLs, with the exact same wording, had in fact been published by Quantic Dream in some cases nearly two whole years earlier, for senior positions too. We found nearly a dozen of these altered listings and although the changes don’t necessarily prove that Quantic Dream is in trouble, it does indicate that the studio is being careful in showing potential developer talent that it is doing well. In addition, one source also suggested that the reasoning behind the Star Wars Eclipse trailer being shown off so early in development was not only to gain talent interest, but also to attract potential buyers. Rumors have suggested that Quantic Dream had wanted to be acquired for a while following its three-game Sony deal, with sources suggesting that pitches were made to several publishers in order to get the studio acquired. The aforementioned acquisition aspect of this article is hearsay for now, but given that Quantic Dream now has a huge Star Wars IP under its belt, it would make for an attractive target in the new gaming acquisition wars that we’re currently seeing in the industry. Quantic Dream are clearly in a precarious spot with Star Wars Eclipse, but they have traditionally released some good games. 5+ years of development time on a title that has huge ambition could be the formula for success, but only time will tell. Fans just need to be prepared for the wait.
