Despite assurances from Xbox management that it has the necessary resources to make new games, laid off employees insist that development teams have been severely gutted.
While the wider games industry has been suffering from frequent layoffs for several years now, Microsoft and Xbox have received the most scrutiny and backlash because of how destructive they’ve been.
Several studios managed to splinter off and regain their independence in Xbox’s latest string of layoffs, but the ones that stayed have had their teams gutted. This includes most of the staff at id Software that worked on the excellent Doom: The Dark Ages | Revelation DLC.
Now, former employees are rejecting Xbox management’s attempts to spin things positively and are explaining how all this does is make future game development harder.
Multiple employees, who asked to be left anonymous, didn’t mince words when speaking with Game Developer about the layoffs. At id Software, the call announcing the layoffs apparently barely lasted a minute, with one source accusing Microsoft of trying to ‘shove off’ responsibility onto the unions.
One source took umbrage with Xbox’s comments on how it wants to focus on core franchises like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, despite getting rid of so many workers.
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‘Bethesda Game Studios lost a lot of talent this week. Xbox says they want to focus on their core franchises like Fallout and Elder Scrolls but that’s going to be harder than ever now,’ they said.
Another rightly pointed out that a lot of institutional knowledge has also been lost and ‘Those that are left must be scrambling to pick up the pieces.’
The dismantling of id Software is particularly outrageous and Game Developer’s report only further corroborates how much talent the studio has lost.
It’s claimed that ‘They’ve just gotten rid of all the people who could ever fix, maintain, or change [id Tech],’ referring to id Software’s custom game engine that’s been reiterated upon for decades and used for the Doom games plus other Bethesda projects.
The source believes this is a sign that id Tech will just be abandoned, adding, ‘I cannot imagine a path forward where they make another game in id Tech.’
Xbox says it still wants more Doom games, but that seems very unlikely at the moment as there’s simply not enough people left to make it.
The company has already tried to downplay such concerns, sharing a public statement via the id Software X account that the studio still has ‘the crew we need to build the games and tech we’re known for’ and claims it is now about the same size as it was when it released the 2016 Doom game.
That may sound reassuring, but it doesn’t mean much if a lot of the people responsible for making that game as good as it was are no longer employed at the studio.
ZeniMax Online Studios, the developer behind The Elder Scrolls Online, has also reportedly been severely affected, according to Game File, including losing its leadership team and studio head Joseph Burba, who had been part of the studio since 2012.
The studio is already transitioning to new leadership and all this is happening despite The Elder Scrolls Online apparently doing well for itself after it pivoted away from annual expansions to seasonal content updates.
‘All of the information that was ever visible to us out of those numbers meetings—out of the monthly staff meetings—were that we were doing fine,’ one source explained to Game Developer. ‘We were improving on the metrics [Microsoft] wanted us to improve on.’
Elder Scrolls Online players shouldn’t be surprised if content updates slow down because of these cuts, according to one former staff member, Morgan Goin, who told the BBC: ‘We’re not going to be able to put out the amount of content at the speed that we were… or anything approaching that.’
Perhaps the worst part about all this is that the layoffs aren’t actually over. Despite 3,200 people being let go, only half that number were immediately impacted; the remaining half are set to leave before next July and it’s not clear what positions or studios that will involve.
Remaining Xbox employees now have to work on new games and appease upper management despite the complete lack of any job security. As one source put it, ‘I don’t know how anyone remaining at Xbox studios can feel safe knowing another 1,600 cuts are coming.’
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