Catalyst Game Labs, publisher of the BattleTech and Shadowrun tabletop lines, has laid off editor-at-large Jennifer Brozek. Brozek announced the cut Wednesday on her website and on Bluesky.
“Blog: Life Plot Twist. I’ve been laid off from CGL and I’m having complicated feelings around the situation,” she wrote on Bluesky. The post links to her website entry, which opens: “Here’s the lede: I’ve been laid off from Catalyst Game Labs as an Editor-at-large.”
Brozek has written for Catalyst since her 2014 BattleTech novel The Nellus Academy Incident, which won a Scribe Award. Her Rogue Academy trilogy followed, running from Iron Dawn in 2019 to Crimson Night in 2021. Her Shadowrun credits include the 2015 novella DocWagon 19, the 2021 novella See How She Runs, and the young-adult novel Auditions, which also won a Scribe Award. In a November 2024 podcast interview she described Augment, a Shadowrun magazine, and Shadowrun Through the Decades, an anthology marking the line’s 35th anniversary. Her footprint at Catalyst is larger in Shadowrun than in BattleTech.
Catalyst cut an editorial position, and that usually means the fiction line is shrinking. Publishers rarely lay off editors while sales are climbing, which points to trouble in Catalyst’s sales department. Fandom Pulse found no indication of other layoffs at Catalyst at this time and is monitoring the situation closely.
The layoff follows a run of decisions that cost the company goodwill with its audience. BattleTech author Blaine Pardoe says Catalyst suspended his new publications in July 2022 over online activity it said did not fit its publishing vision. In 2024 the company rereleased the anthology The Corps with an Amazon listing that named every contributor except Pardoe, though his story is printed in the book. This month a Catalyst “Mechtober” graphic listing BattleTech authors left him off again. Pardoe responded: “So, I guess I wasn’t a BattleTech writer? Thirty-plus years of content says otherwise.” Meanwhile Catalyst put out BattleTech Romance: Hungry Like Wolves by Christina F. York as a Valentine’s Day release. Fandom Pulse’s view is that Shadowrun has drifted the same direction as BattleTech under Catalyst.
It is of note that Brozek, like many other activist authors, moved to BlueSky from X to attempt to virtue signal that she’s not with the people over on X, who are the normal people in society.
Late last month, Brozek posted on Bluesky, unprompted to attack the author of this article: “Just loved being lumped into her “evil league of evil.” She’s now in the same category as JDA for me. All she wants is attention and she will attack people to do it.”
Belle is another activist woman who worked with the Gencon Writer’s Symposium befor getting unceremoniously removed. Ironically, it seems like Brozek here is invoking “JDA” as some kind of virtue signal on BlueSky for attention as she makes these comments, as many aspiring creators who don’t make enough money in this industry to survive do.
If Catalyst is cutting editors from its fiction department, what does that say about how its books are selling?
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