Microsoft Starts Year With New Round Of Layoffs

Microsoft has started the year with some distressing news, as they have decided to start a new round of layoffs in the company.

We reported that Microsoft laid off 1,000 of their workers October of last year. That was a separate round of layoffs compared to now, which is significantly broader in scope.

This time, the company is looking to let go of 5 % of their 220,000 employees, which amounts to 11,000 employees.

This time, the scope of the job cuts was also not yet made clear, so we don’t know yet if this directly involves Team Xbox or any of the employees at the game studios they own.

It may be easy to forget the scope of Microsoft’s game studio acquisitions as many of their games are also published on PC. But we are talking about 25 distinct studios, each having a specialty genre.

Among the most important of these studios are:

• 343 Industries, the caretakers of the Halo franchise
• Arkane Studios, developers of Dishonored, Deathloop, and the upcoming Redfall
• Bethesda Game Studios, possibly still their most high profile acquisition
• Double Fine, once one of the biggest indie game studios around
• Id Software, currently still riding high on the latest Doom games
• MachineGames, the studio that spearheaded the modern day Wolfenstein reboot
• Mojang, the creators of Minecraft
• Ninja Theory, who made a name for themselves with Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• Obsidian, the makers of The Pillars of Eternity, and more recently, The Outer Worlds
• Turn 10, the stewards of the Forza franchise
• Playground Games, one a support studio for Turn 10 to make Forza, now given the keys to the Fable franchise
• Tango Gameworks, the creators of The Evil Within and Ghostwire Tokyo
• The Coalition, the stewards to the Gears franchise
• Undead Labs, the developers of the State of Decay franchise
• and, finally, World’s Edge, the caretakers of Age of Empires

And of course, Microsoft itself is a considerably bigger company than just its video games. Other segments within Microsoft that could be facing job cuts include their hardware division at Surface, the office suite Microsoft Office division, or the company’s current bread and butter, their cloud division.

It had been stated that job cuts will particularly be felt in the engineering division, suggesting that the Surface division in particular may go through a rough time in the future.

We may not have to wait too long to learn the details of these layoffs, as Microsoft has a financial earnings report and investors call scheduled this coming January 24, 2023. The following day, the company will be having their Xbox Developer Direct, revealing and unveiling upcoming games from Microsoft owned studios for Xbox and PC.

Source: Video Games Chronicle