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VOOZH | about |
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VOOZH | about |
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| 👁 Transformers Reactivate Logo.png Yeah, yeah, get your "Deactivated" jokes out of your system. | ||
| Developer | Certain Affinity Splash Damage | |
| Writer | Simon Furman[1] | |
| Platform | PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S | |
| Release date | Cancelled | |
Transformers: Reactivate is a cancelled online multiplayer game developed by Splash Damage. It was announced in December 2022 via a teaser trailer that was pretty scant on details, with plans for a closed beta that would be happening soon. However, due to an infamously troubled development cycle, nothing of the game was shown outside of that teaser for another 763 days, leaving many to question the state of the project. The game was ultimately announced as cancelled in January 2025, seemingly existing as little more than vaporware to the world at large.
In truth, however, the story was much more complicated. Spending nearly seven long years in development hell across two developers, Reactivate was beset by multiple troubles that hampered progress, and the bulk of our knowledge about the game comes from anonymous development team members and leaks that showed more of the product than was ever officially confirmed, including playable characters, gameplay mechanics, and an attempted overall transition from a microtransaction-laden live service game to a premium AAA experience.
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Earth is attacked by the Legion, an alien race whose nanomachine-based composition allows them to quickly recover from any injury. Realizing the threat at hand, the Autobots and Decepticons join forces, working with the humans to repel the invaders, but a massive EMP takes all the Transformers offline, leaving the humans to be quickly overwhelmed. Seventy years later, civilization is in ruins and humanity is on the brink of extinction. However, a small resistance force known as the Renegades continue to fight back, and have begun to recover and revive the derelict Transformers in the hopes they can help finally turn the tide of the war. With Optimus Prime and Megatron both missing in action, the recently reactivated Bumblebee steps up to lead the survivors in a final campaign that will decide the fate of the planet.
| Autobots | Decepticons | Humans | Others |
|---|---|---|---|
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Calling the development of Transformers: Reactivate "tumultuous" would be like calling the Decepticons "kinda mean". From its quiet announcement to its ignominious end, the project went through a series of hardships throughout its development, much of which was never publicly confirmed; even now, the parties involved are still under strict NDA regarding the game, preventing them from making any substantial comments on the record. As a result, it's difficult to be 100% certain of exactly what happened...but we're going to try our best anyway. Thus, we've cobbled together the following summary of events from public announcements, various leaks, postmortem analyses, and other assorted sources in an attempt to paint a clearer picture of why this game was never released. Some details will inevitably be inaccurate due to the secrecy surrounding the game and the nature by which much of this information was obtained, but barring any sort of additional tell-all from other members of either development team, this is probably the closest we can get to the full story with the information we have available.
Word of the game's existence first surfaced at the end of 2017, around the same time as Activision's exclusivity deal with Hasbro to produce Transformers games came to an end. In Chinese holding company Leyou's annual report for that year, they stated that they had entered into a licensing agreement with Hasbro back in August to produce a massively multiplayer online shooter based on the property, similar to their hit game Warframe, and had tapped recently acquired American game studio Certain Affinity to develop it.[2] Not much would be said about the project for most of the following year, presumably because work was still very early, though Certain Affinity CEO Max Hoberman stated in an August 2018 interview that the project was both their biggest to date and their first time utilizing the free-to-play games as a service (GaaS) model.[3] Leyou also confirmed in their annual report for that year that the game's budget had increased from $15 million to $33 million.[4]
The game was publicly announced by Leyou in August 2019 at the Chinajoy 2019 event, under the tentative title of Transformers Online, and that it would be released for both PC and then-current consoles.[5] This would be the main news about the game for the year, with nothing else of it mentioned by anyone involved aside from the fact that it was still being worked on. Around this time, Digital Domain was commissioned to create an internal cinematic trailer for investors, an extended version of which was planned to be shown as the game's announcement trailer at E3 2020. However, due to the event's cancellation amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, combined with becoming outdated following the game's later reworks, this trailer never saw official release. In January of 2020, a former Certain Affinity employee was found to have listed "Transformers: Impact" on their résumé, suggesting that this was the game's real title.[6] Later in July, Leyou issued a press release stating that they had invested another $10 million into Certain Affinity to improve the game, and that an open beta period would be beginning soon, with 70% of its "core gameplay" completed.[7] A month later, Leyou made the announcement that British studio Splash Damage, another developer under their purview, would be assisting with Impact's development going forward.[8]
Things would take a bit of a turn in August 2020 when Chinese media conglomerate Tencent made a bid to acquire Leyou for $1.5 billion, which would ultimately be finalized in December.[9] As a result of this, a handful of Leyou documents were made public, including what appeared to be early pitch slides for Transformers: Impact. The slides described a battle between the Autobots and Decepticons over an alien superweapon called the Aegis, which is destroyed in the battle in a massive explosion that wipes out most of the Transformers; with the shards of the Aegis landing on Earth and starting to corrupt the planet, the remaining Autobots and Decepticons are forced to band together to survive. The presentation also elaborated on the gameplay loop, live service elements, and other plans, including the original planned release of Q4 2018 for early access and Q2 2019 for the full launch. Obviously, that didn't happen, leading to multiple date amendments in the presentation, with the most recent placing the hard deadline for launch as October 31, 2021 for the open beta, and April 30, 2022 for the full release; presumably Splash Damage was brought on to help make sure the project hit these dates.[10] Most of 2021 would go by without any further news, save for the name Transformers: Rise appearing on a Certain Affinity employee's résumé and an unspecified Chinese company registering "www.transformersrise.com", both seemingly pointing to a title change. However, it was also around this time that the public learned of massive walkouts at Leyou following the Tencent acquisition, including CEO Alexa Xu. Several former employees claimed that leadership had only acquired major licenses like Transformers and The Lord of the Rings to make the company look better and potentially make more from the buyout, with no intention of ever actually finishing the games, though these claims were never substantiated.[11] Regardless of whether or not they were true, though, the whole thing left many fans feeling a lot more apprehensive about the project, as by this point, not only had the "deadline" for the open beta come and gone, but not a single screenshot or piece of footage had been officially released.
UNofficially, however, late 2022 is when the leaks really started coming. Less of a leak, more of a dam bursting, really. In just a few months, tons of information and media from Certain Affinity's work on Rise up to that point started to make its way out into the public sphere, gathered from development team member websites and other anonymous sources. This included unfinished character models and renders, fully-voiced cutscenes, images of the UI, and more. These leaks also gave us the first details of the game's new story, which focused on an alien threat known as "Legion" that had already conquered Earth decades prior, wiping out most of humanity and taking the Transformers offline, along with a ragtag band of human survivors working to restore the Transformers to help them fight back. Though attempts were made by Hasbro and the dev team to take it all down and scrub the evidence from the internet, fans had already taken notice, and more Rise details continued to emerge over the course of the next two years, including actual gameplay footage. It was also around this time that fans pieced together from developer résumés that Certain Affinity had been taken off the project, with Splash Damage taking over as lead developer.
On December 8, 2022, Transformers: Reactivate was finally officially announced via a teaser trailer presented at The Game Awards 2022. Despite all the leaks up to that point, this was the first (and ultimately only) time fans had gotten to see anything official of the game, as well as the first mention of the final title and the first public confirmation of development transitioning to Splash Damage. After another full year of radio silence, it was then announced in December 2023 that any further news on the game would be delayed until some unspecified time in 2024, due to the project being migrated to Unreal Engine 5[12] (something which Splash Damage had previously confirmed back in March at the Game Developers Conference[13]). This was the last official word on the game for a very long time, with 2024 coming and going without any further mention. The extended silence led a number of people to presume that the project had finally gotten the axe, and though many fans refused to believe it, the writing was on the wall. By June 2024, the game's trailer was silently delisted from the game's official accounts, likely as a result of the license for the trailer's music expiring. The game's Instagram page was similarly deactivated later that year.
Behind the scenes, however, things had hit a roadblock well before even that teaser trailer was released. Compared to the Certain Affinity builds, media of which continued to leak even after being taken off the project, Splash Damage kept things much more under wraps, with no media reaching the public sphere until after the game had already been cancelled. As a result, the majority of our knowledge of what happened during this period comes from a Reddit post by an anonymous Splash Damage employee, who posted under the apt name "extfdev" after the cancellation was confirmed.[14] In their post, extfdev confirmed that Splash Damage had become the primary developer on Reactivate around the time of the Tencent deal, and at first attempted to continue where they and Certain Affinity had left off. Other insiders would corroborate this, suggesting that the game was only 8–10 months from completion at the time, with the remaining work mostly consisting of creating extra content and missions to pad out playtime. These insiders also alleged that the shift in developer was due to internal conflicts between the publisher and Certain Affinity over the game's direction (i.e. how "exactly like Warframe"-y it should be). It wasn't long, though, before Splash Damage decided to reboot the project in a bid to make it their own rather than just be the cleanup team on someone else's work. The reboot would retain the overall plot and many of the assets, but dramatically rework the gameplay and overall structure of the game. The problem, however, was that beyond "make an awesome big budget Transformers game", nothing else ever really solidified in terms of direction.
According to extfdev, this came down to a lack of clear vision from the top-down: with their acquisition by Tencent, they were free to work on their own projects without having to settle for being a work-for-hire studio as they had been up to that point; however, without another company to provide direction on the project, Splash Damage struggled with finding that direction themselves. Multiple individuals took on project leadership roles, then forced the team to undo months of work by changing something they weren't happy with, before leaving and being replaced with someone else. This process repeated countless times and left Reactivate's dev team stuck going in circles, constantly remaking what they already had instead of making meaningful forward progress. Gameplay progression switched from open-world to level-based to a blend of the two likened to Tom Clancy's The Division. Features like raid bosses and a horde mode were added and dropped. Characters were designed and redesigned and redesigned again. By 2023, the team had also become very aware that the GaaS model wouldn't be doing the game any favors, with high-profile failures like Marvel's Avengers acting as a cautionary tale. As a result, Splash Damage decided to pivot the game to a standalone triple-A experience instead, which brought about its own complications and conflicts.
Eventually things reached a point where the team had created lots of unused assets...but no actual game. Tencent believed in Reactivate enough that the original deadline was extended by a full year to try and save it, but by summer of 2024, Splash Damage only had one demo level to show for all their time and effort, one which was not playtesting well at that, and it became clear to everyone that the project wouldn't be able to be salvaged, forcing Tencent to pull the plug. With Reactivate helping keep the studio afloat, Splash Damage spent the next half a year looking for someone to provide additional funding for the game or offer the team a new project to fill the gap Reactivate left, but when those efforts failed, they made the hard decision to fully cut their losses.
The game was finally announced as cancelled via Splash Damage's Twitter account on January 8, 2025. Far more sobering was the accompanying announcement that the studio would be downsizing, leaving roughly over 100 hard-working employees jobless as a result of the aforementioned funding struggles, a depressing end to the whole unfortunate saga.[15] Splash Damage would later be sold to private equity investors the following September, with the cancellation allegedly playing a major role in the decision.[16] Some additional details have emerged in the time since the cancellation, such as extfdev's post, Simon Furman's confirmation that he was contributing to the story, and even more leaked footage from both Certain Affinity's version and Splash Damage's last GaaS build, but by and large, far as we can tell, the story of Transformers: Reactivate is now officially over. Finished.
Standing testament to the game's fraught development cycle is the troubled tale of its tie-in toys from Hasbro. The first public evidence of these products surfaced in early 2021, when store listings under the codename "Shine" (as in "rise and shine") for a pair of two-packs were first discovered.[17] The packs' Hasbro product numbers (which are broadly assigned in numerical order) suggested they were developed around the same time as 2021's War for Cybertron: Kingdom toyline, and a confidential slide leaked years later indeed confirmed that, at one stage, these figures were intended to hit shelves late that year.[18]
The packs were delayed from that planned 2021 launch, no doubt in the hope of still aligning with the release of Reactivate itself, but with the game's development continuing to stretch on, it seems Hasbro eventually grew tired of waiting and officially launched both packs in November 2023—although some retailers inadvertently listed the Starscream/Bumblebee pack a month early, complete with an out-of-date set of stock photography which depicted the products in a Transformers: Rise-branded box.[19]
The next year, and once again not in connection with any news or update on the game itself, Hasbro re-released the Bumblebee figure by itself in the Studio Series toyline's Deluxe Class assortment, as part of the line's "Gamer Edition" sub-branding.
