Joanna Dark actor Alix Wilton Regan has implored fans to use their voices to save Perfect Dark, after the game was cancelled by Microsoft earlier this week.
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced a wave of layoffs across the company, with games such as its Perfect Dark reboot, a new Zenimax MMORPG and Rare’s Everwild all cancelled as a result. At this time, Microsoft also shuttered Perfect Dark’s studio, The Initiative.
Soon after, Joanna Dark’s actor shared an image of her Perfect Dark character on social media, calling her “Resilient. Determined. Creative. Caring. Strong”. Adding that her time working with The Initiative had been “an honour”, Regan stated: “Agent Dark doesn’t give up and neither should any of you…. like Joanna, we will all rise again.”
Regan has now called for fans to “speak up if you wanna see Perfect Dark survive”. In a recent social media post, the Joanna actor wrote that “a lot of people have been reaching out and floating this idea on my timeline, my phone and in my DMs, so I’m just gonna say it:
“I HOPE WE LIVE IN A NICE WORLD.”
Meanwhile, actor Elias Toufexis – known for playing Adam Jensen in the Deus Ex series – says “thousands of dollars” he was expecting will now be lost due to the cancellation of Perfect Dark.
In his own post on social media, Toufexis revealed he had “a good amount of days of acting in Perfect Dark” that got “scrapped” when Microsoft put an end to the reboot earlier this week.
“These games getting cancelled is a constant threat,” Toufexis wrote, “..now every game I do as director or actor I wake up hoping it isn’t cancelled.”
In subsequent posts, the actor, who has also had roles in the likes of Starfield, assured his followers that he does get paid for the days he works. “But when you’re working on a game they ‘hold’ you for x amount of days each month. (so I can schedule work around other games and shows),” Toufexis elaborated.
“You can’t help but look at the holds and think about the $ that would have been made.”
Word of this week’s layoffs at Microsoft – which also impacted the likes of King, Raven Software and more – first began last month, when a report stated Xbox was set to restructure much of its central-European distribution. At this time, Bloomberg described the then-upcoming redundancies as a “major restructuring”, and the fourth case of layoffs to hit Xbox in the last 18 months.
In May, Xbox cut three percent of its total workforce, which at the time was the biggest loss of staff since 2023. Previously in September 2024, Xbox laid off 650 employees, which it said was to “organise our business for long term success”.
