As part of broader layoffs at Microsoft affecting several thousand people, multiple studios and teams under the Xbox umbrella have seen significant cuts, cancellations, and closures of their own – the fourth big wave of such redundancies in roughly 18 months.
Devs across the industry responded to the news – which seems to have reached affected employees in confusing and disconcerting patches, assuming they were informed at all before seeing it reported elsewhere – by expressing concern for the direction of Xbox and the games industry, support for affected employees, and frustration at yet another case of workers cashing leadership's checks.
Many current and/or former Xbox studio employees shared word of the layoffs on social media. One employee says Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, who's been covering the layoffs in social media updates as staggered confirmations roll in, "is getting these updates almost faster than I, an impacted employee at Zenimax Online Studios, am. Which is creating a borderline slapstick layer to this experience."
Schreier reported that the rollout has been such a mess that some Zenimax employees were abruptly locked out of their Slack accounts without explanation or notice, left wondering if they still have a job or if there's just been collateral damage to company logins. "This literally just happened to my coworker as we were in the middle of a conversation," one Zenimax employee says.
"Just a giant black hole sucking everything in, and spitting out bones," says Baldur's Gate 3 publishing director Michael Douse, sharing a post reporting some 9,000 layoffs across Microsoft. In a statement to GamesRadar+, Microsoft confirmed that the total layoff impact is "less than 4%" of the company, which was last estimated at around 228,000 people, so the math roughly checks out.
"While I'm excited for more games, it's important to remember that behind all the PR and hype is the simple truth that they bought portfolios, not people," Douse continues. "When you're bought, they're not buying *you*. Consolidation is bad for jobs. Bad for the industry. Bad for consumer rights. Growth shouldn't come at the expense of people, it should be for the people."
Veteran animator Robert Morrison, known for the likes of The Last of Us and God of War, writes: "The long time problem in the video game industry is too many people in leadership positions have been allowed to fail upwards. People that have made poor decisions with bad ideas, contributing to project cancellations, low sales, and studio closures. Good at talking and good at making friends, but not good at making great games. They keep their jobs, they keep getting promoted, and everyone else has to pay the cost."
Indie dev and consultant vet Rami Ismail examined a message sent to staff by Xbox boss Phil Spencer. "One mistake people make with these letters is assume they're written for humans, but they're not," Ismail said. "There's no contrast. They're written for shareholders, & for them, this text is just a non-stop parade of good news. Record numbers? All verticals up? Layoffs?! What a feast, for them, what a feast."
Bonnie Patterson, "lead narrative designer on unannounced console shooter," responded to another report noting 9,000 affected staff. "9000 people who have poured every inch of their hearts and souls into titles just so they can make people happy, watching everything they made just get dumped like it was worthless," she says. "It wasn't worthless. We aren't worthless. The world is just fucked."
"Today is just another travesty in the game industry," says Respawn veteran and former Halo dev Patrick Wren. "Every day it’s hard to see what the future of this industry is."
