Night Street Games lays off staff after Last Flag misses expectations

Night Street Games has laid off staff after Last Flag failed to deliver the financial results the studio expected, turning a buzzy multiplayer bet into a painful reset. Executive producer Jonathan Jelinek said on LinkedIn that some “exceptionally talented developers” were affected and invited companies looking for experienced Unreal developers to get in touch, making clear the cuts were tied to a specific project and production pipeline, not just a general trim.

Jelinek said Last Flag had a very smooth technical launch, which points the blame squarely at the market rather than the build. The shooter launched on April 14, 2026, and Night Street Games tried to keep momentum moving with a Steam update on May 1 that outlined plans and future updates. The studio had already announced free weekends from Friday through Monday starting April 24, running until its first major content patch, expected early in summer 2026.

The numbers show how hard the climb was. SteamDB lists Last Flag at $14.99, with 595 reviews and a 72.89% positive rating. Its all-time concurrent-player peak was 558 on April 15, 2026, and SteamDB showed only 9 players in-game at the time of the scrape. Metacritic’s aggregation also noted a lean launch package, with just two maps and one mode, a limitation that fed concerns about how long players would stick around even as Night Street teased a ten-contestant roster expansion, including Graffiti, and a new map preview.

That tension, between polish and staying power, sits at the center of Last Flag’s stumble. Night Street Games described the shooter as a 5v5 televised capture-the-flag competition, and the concept had backing from a studio cofounded by Imagine Dragons members Dan Reynolds and Mac Reynolds, which gave the project a level of visibility most indie multiplayer shooters never get. Even so, visibility did not guarantee scale, and the layoffs now land in a month already marked by reductions across Metacore, 2K, MercurySteam, and Survios.

Night Street says it wants to keep Last Flag alive and hand it over to the community so players can keep enjoying it for years to come. That is often the last turn a struggling multiplayer game takes when the business case weakens, and it leaves the studio’s staff paying the price for a launch that looked smooth on the server side but never found the audience it needed.