A games industry analyst says that Xbox is being acquired in reverse after the publisher announced that it is placing some of its studios under Bethesda and Activision.
Microsoft announced last week that the next wave of redundancies, as part of the planned 3,200 jobs cuts across Xbox throughout FY27, would not only result in the loss of 268 jobs – with the likes of Halo Studios and The Coalition affected – but also mark a major reshuffle for Xbox Game Studios. Notably, Playground Games and Turn 10 have been merged, Bethesda Game Studios is now managing Obsidian Entertainment, while Rare, World's Edge, and the Halo franchise have been moved under Activision Blizzard.
Joost van Dreunen, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and games industry analyst, posts on Substack about the changes, describing it as a "reverse acquisition of Xbox." Van Dreunen says "folding Halo, one of Xbox's prized IPs, into Activision, the firm it acquired in 2023, is surprising at best. At worst, it's evidence of how poorly Xbox was running its studios."
"Bringing Halo under Activision, even with a dedicated team, is a logical step. But it doesn't guarantee success," Ven Dreunen notes, citing that Call of Duty's biggest launch with Black Ops 6 saw a sharp drop-off of players by the time spring rolled around. He adds that we're now watching "a reverse acquisition in slow motion, where the publisher Microsoft paid $69 billion for [what] turns out to be the division best equipped to run the studios Microsoft built itself."
Van Dreunen likens Xbox's recent acquisitions to Disney's 2006 purchase of Pixar, in which senior Pixar members were put in charge of Disney's then-struggling in-house animation studio while Pixar was in the midst of a generational run. He adds, "It's becoming evident that Microsoft's acquisitions were less about the IP and more about the managerial talent."
Microsoft has had annual rounds of layoffs since acquiring Activision Blizzard King in late 2023, and we're now reaching the point where – through rampant studio closures and a number of studios now falling under the remit of Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and King – Xbox Game Studios is down to a handful of studios.
