So much for all those studio purchases. What a waste.
The modern American dream - figure out how to get paid tens of millions to spend someone else’s tens of billions chasing my own tail. No, I don’t create a fucking thing. I get rich by dismantling shit that used to have value!
What exactly is the point of buying these game studios to just shut them down?
follow Microsoft’s lead in removing layers of management to increase agility and effectiveness
I didn’t realise the game was being developed entirely by management.
Also I hate the “increased agility” line. No-one gets more agile by having to cover the work of laid off folks on too of your own workload.
There’s a logic to a smaller team being more “agile” than a larger team, but yeah these companies aren’t turning them into smaller studios. They’re expecting fewer people to do the work of a larger studio. The problems are obviously except to execs who are literally too stupid to think.
It’ll be fine because with CoPilot all 10 of the remaining programmers will be able to do the work of 1000!
That or we’re going to see increasingly shoddy AAA titles in the near future and the industry is going to implode.
I think…
I think this is it. We’re in the “coughing up blood” stage of Xbox divesting from hardware and turning into just a publisher.
The can’t even publish games properly at this point. They’re just gobbling up other studio/publisher’s products for Gamepass.
News of Everwild’s cancellation arrives amid more layoffs at Microsoft; the company is reportedly slashing nearly 9,000 jobs as part of new cuts at Microsoft.
Wow. It was rumored to be a big layoff, but 9,000 is way over any forecast. And this is what? The third so far since Covid? Is there anyone left working for them, at this point? Or is it all seasonal contractors?
EDIT: turns out that they gutted The Initiative (the supposedly AAAA studio that never released anything), cancelled Everwild, cut 50% of Turn10, 10% of King, and cancelled an unknown number of unannounced games, including one MMO title developed by the TES Online devs.
What a bloodbath. But hey, at least Phil is safe.Contractors never count in layoff numbers, so this number would be much, much worse if you included them. The actual job losses could easily be more than doubled.
But seriously this is tragic as hell for all the people losing their jobs and seeing all the work they did on the game go up in a puff of smoke.
I don’t think we get granular info on this stuff, all we know is this latest round of cuts involves sales too as they are moving to outsource some of that work. And that Microsoft’s total head count has been mostly level since they added a ton of people with acquisitions and hires in 2022.
Clearly, Xbox has seen a lot of cuts though.
Fuck!!!
More bad news from Xbox, I was hoping they’d cut Phil Spencer lose instead…They need a brand-new lead to make Xbox awesome again. I can’t say that I am surprised, though, as this game has been in dev for 7 years. However, there should’ve been something that could be salvaged and made into a viable game.
