This has been an astoundingly brutal year for Xbox, and the carnage continued on Tuesday.
Microsoft’s gaming division announced in a blog post that it’s laying off 268 people across its first-party studios, on top of 1,600 roles that were cut in July. According to Xbox executive Matt Booty, Tuesday’s cuts bring us to roughly 75 percent of all currently planned cuts to Xbox’s payroll, which means more layoffs are presumably coming.
For the employees who do remain, Xbox is also reshuffling its development deck to a severe degree. Perhaps most notably, the celebrated Halo franchise is now under the control of Xbox subsidiary Activision, maker of Call of Duty. Halo Studios, which was created with the sole purpose of making Halo games, will live on as a support studio for the time being. Age of Empires developer World’s Edge and Sea of Thieves developer Rare are also under the Activision umbrella now.
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Beyond that, Elder Scrolls and Fallout developer Bethesda has taken Pentiment and Avowed developer Obsidian under its wing. Mobile game developer King is fusing with Microsoft Casual Games, too. Lastly, Playground Games and Turn 10 will join forces to be the stewards of both the Fable and Forza franchises. Many of those partnerships already existed in a sense, as Obsidian had worked with Bethesda before, while the same is true of Playground and Turn 10, but they’re seemingly more formalized now.
The blog post also addressed some of Xbox’s former subsidiaries. The studios Compulsion, Double Fine, and Undead Labs have all escaped the Xbox ecosystem, but agreements for Hellblade developer Ninja Theory fell through, and Xbox is exploring a possible closure. Dishonored developer Arkane is still in negotiations with Xbox to potentially be spun off.
While some Xbox fans may have found optimism in the recent leadership changes at the company, but so far the Asha Sharma era has been defined almost entirely by layoffs and studio closures. That’s to say nothing of the recent harsh limits imposed on Game Pass streaming and the ongoing BDS boycott of the Xbox brand over the past year and a half. Needless to say, things are not going well from the outside looking in.
