Less than 2 months after releasing Tron: Catalyst, developer Bithell Games lays off the majority of full-time staff
The videogame industry took yet another shot to the gut today as Bithell Games, the developer of John Wick Hex and Tron: Catalyst, announced that it is laying off 11 employees after being "unable to secure a new larger scale project." Studio founder Mike Bithell said the layoffs represent "the majority of our full-time staff."
"It became clear leading up to the release of our most recent game that we were not immune to the challenges faced by many game development teams seeking funding partners in 2024 and 2025," Bithell wrote on Bluesky. "We’ve fortunately been able to communicate these challenges ahead of time, and work with affected staff to ease departures as much as possible via severance packages."
Bithell Games was founded in 2013 following Mike Bithell's success with the 2012 puzzle-platformer Thomas Was Alone. In the years since, the studio has released both small-scale indie games, including Volume and Quarantine Circular, and higher-visibility licensed fare like John Wick Hex and Tron: Catalyst.
Interestingly, the licensed games don't appear to have done much good for the studio. John Wick Hex debuted in 2019 as an Epic exclusive so we don't have players numbers from its first year, but its top concurrent player count on Steam, where it arrived a year later, was just 85, according to SteamDB. It was removed from sale in July.
Tron: Catalyst, which launched in June of this year, fared even more poorly, peaking at just 56 concurrent players on Steam. Concurrent numbers can only tell you so much about the success of singleplayer games, of course, but the 61 total Steam reviews also point to a muted launch.
Bithell said the layoffs "will not impact the availability of our existing self-published games and ongoing support for them." Tron: Catalyst is presumably excluded from that list because, like John Wick Hex, it's published by Big Fan Games.