On Wednesday, Splash Damage, the development team behind Transformers: Reactivate has announced the project has been cancelled and the dev team faces lay offs.
Transformers: Reactivate has faced a rocky development since it entered production in 2019. This was back when the game was announced to be under development from Certain Affinity, and the title was referred to as “Rise” instead of Reactivate when being produced from 2017 to 2020. After 2020, development was taken over by Splash Damage, and a recent video uploaded to Gamingfora in December 2024 bolstered hopes Reactivate is still alive (the video gameplay is from 2020).
But since Transformers: Reactivate has been re-announced at TGA 2022, fans have heard radio silence until today. The developers at Splash Damage have announced the project has been officially cancelled on their official X (formerly Twitter) account, in a longwinded statement that can be seen below.
Splash Damage writes “Today, we have some very difficult news to share, the decision has been made to end development of Transformers: Reactivate. This means we will be scaling down to refocus our efforts on other projects, Unfortunately, despite every effort, a number of roles across the studio are now potentially at risk of redundancy.” Splash Damage warned that lay offs could be on the horizon while thanking fans for their support during the development period.
Splash Damage has been responsible for helping develop Gears 5, Gears Tactics and Halo: The Master Chief Collection under the Microsoft Game Studios banner, the studio opened in 2001 initially getting its foot in the door by creating mods for Quake 3 and Team Fortress. Lay offs in the gaming industry have continued to run rampant, with an estimated total of jobs lost in 2024 reaching ~14,600 as reported by Farhan Noor, a developer who has been aggregating all lay off information in the gaming industry since 2022. Splash Damage has not reported how many jobs will be affected by the cancellation of Transformers: Reactivate yet.
