Some new rumors have dropped regarding claims that there will be a new round of layoffs in Microsoft, particularly in their gaming division.
The rumors started one week from now, but we slowly received more details, albeit none of them have yet to be confirmed. George Broussard claimed that Microsoft was actually closing studios, and they could be laying off between 1,000 to 2,000 game developers.
And then, two separate sources claimed that Turn 10 Studios, based in Redmond, Washington, and Stoic, based in Austin, Texas, are particularly set to have huge layoffs.
That takes us to today. Andy Robinson of Video Games Chronicle shared this on Twitter at the end of last week:
Can’t confirm any specific details (& imagine few would be able to) but there’s certainly a lot of negative chatter coming out of the UK Xbox studios today. For the sake of employees, I hope details are confirmed swiftly, but I expect this will drag well into next week.
After a quick check, we were able to confirm three Xbox Game Studios that were founded and are headquartered in the UK:
- Ninja Theory, based in Cambridge, recently released Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II,
- Playground Games, based in Leamington Spa, currently working on the next Fable, and
- Rare, based in Twycross, Leicestershire, currently doing active support and development on Sea of Thieves, and also working on an upcoming original game called Everwild.
It is possible that there are other Xbox Studios that have divisions in the UK that will themselves be affected. As we also outlined, the first two studios that were named to have rumored layoffs are based in the US, and not the UK. So in spite of Robinson’s rumor, it’s possible that Xbox studios outside of the UK will also be potentially affected.
No studios under Activision Blizzard King or Bethesda studios have been brought up in rumors, though there’s a lot of speculation on some of them. We believe that when Microsoft acquired these studios, they also reviewed what divisions and positions represented redundancies, and they already made decisions on what positions to cut earlier. We won’t claim that these divisions are definitely safe. At the very least, there is reason to believe they are at least lesser priorities in potential cuts in the company.
As we have pointed out before, this marks three years of an ongoing wave of layoffs that have been ongoing across the industry and for other game companies as well. Unfortunately, we don’t know when and under what circumstances this wave of layoffs will actually end. One can speculate that in spite of the burst of success in Microsoft’s gaming division, it hasn’t been enough success to counter prevailing trends. We do believe, if Microsoft goes ahead with these layoffs, their management – and we would specifically look at Matt Booty, Phil Spencer, and people higher up – should explain this to their very attentive and discriminating player base.
