Xbox lays off 268 more employees, merges Obsidian into Bethesda, and puts Activision in charge of Halo
Overview & Key Takeaways
Xbox says it's now "roughly three-quarters of the way" to completing its planned 3,200 job cuts.
What happened
- Xbox executive vice president and chief content officer Matt Booty has announced another round of layoffs and studio reorganizations as part of the continuing "reset" of Microsoft's gaming division
- Xbox has cut an additional 268 employees "across Halo Studios, other first-party studios, and the XGS management and central functions layer," which Booty says brings the company "roughly three-quarters of the way" to completing its downsizing plan that previously put 1,600 people out of work in June
- Activision is now developing the next Halo game with "a new, purpose-built team," and will also oversee Rare and Age of Empires developer World's Edge
- Obsidian will be folded into Bethesda, and will continue its current projects like Grounded and the previously-announced "new Fallout project made in collaboration with Bethesda Game Studios"
- Playground and Turn 10 will be "formally" merged into one studio after being "creative and franchise partners for over a decade"
- Candy Crush developer King will be "uniting" with Microsoft Casual Games
- While Compulsion, Double Fine, and Undead Labs have been transitioned to independent or new publisher ownership, Xbox says it's now moving towards the studio closure of Ninja Theory after two attempted divestiture agreements "fell through"
Does anyone expect this to work?
Lincoln Carpenter
I'll believe it when I see it. In her announcement initiating Xbox's current sweeping restructuring, CEO Asha Sharma wrote that "great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger"—a principle that had been lost at Xbox through redundant layers of management complexity that "slowed decisions, blurred accountability, and made it harder to deliver for players." Xbox, she said, was going to simplify.
It's now three months later, and Xbox's idea of simplification apparently consists of shoving entire studios under new management with the belief that a sufficient number of developers can produce a respectable Halo or Fallout or Fable just because someone says they can.
Meanwhile, its own developers maintain that sustained organizational chaos makes quality game production impossible.
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