The action roguelite Neon Echo has reportedly been canceled after its developer has seemingly laid off its entire staff.

The new report comes from statements from fans following the game who allege the entire staff at developer Xinyuan Studio have been laid off.

These are not official statements and have been made by fans of the game over the past month. There has been no announcements, at least none that have been linked in these discussions, of it happening.

Here’s a rundown by one of the Chinese users on their most recent Bilibili post that summarizes what occurred (machine translation):

[Game News] It is learned that Guangzhou Xinyuan Studio of station B has laid off staff, and the original team size of 427 people has laid off about 220 people. A month ago, Xinyuan Studio organized all employees to hold an internal meeting, saying that the company plans to cut off two projects under research: “The Legend of Sword and Fairy” IP project and “Code W9”, and the project “Neon Sequence” has been launched Also entered the pending list – normal maintenance until the official notification.

On June 6th, it was officially notified that the entire staff of “Neon Sequence” was abolished, leaving less than 10 people in “Code W9”. The compensation plan was announced on June 7, including: the payment of “N+1” resignation compensation; June 16 is the last working day; working days, weekends, and marriage and parental leave will be paid at the rate of 1 to 2 times the salary The multiplier is converted into wages and cashed out; social security provident funds are paid until June, etc. With immediate effect, laid-off employees can leave their jobs.

Game News discovered that the “Neon Sequence”, which was abolished by all staff, had a large-scale content update two weeks ago. It is reported that the reason for the cancellation is that the company expects the game to continue to lose money.

It can only be said that it is a pity… The quality of the game can be seen with the naked eye. If the quality of subsequent updates is guaranteed, the price increase of the official version can turn around the profit and loss… These domestic companies are not willing to invest in instant hits, alas.

Given the summery, it’s odd there has yet to be an official announcement as planned given the layoffs should’ve been complete by June 16th and we are now in July.

While there has been no official confirmation, we reached out to a contact in the company for clarification and were met with the fact that their email no longer exists, indicating that employee no longer works with the company.

Unsurprisingly this news has been met with fan backlash with Neon Echo review bombed on its Steam store page. We did a preview of Neon Echo which you can check out here, but if news of its cancelation are true, then unfortunately there may not be more to the game beyond what we saw then.