Senior game designer Morgan Goin was "blindsided" when she was laid off last week from ZeniMax Online Studios (ZOS), the Xbox-owned developer behind The Elder Scrolls Online. She had known cuts were coming—internal memos and reports had warned of a "bloodbath"—but the scale shocked her.
Earlier this year, Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma announced plans to "reset the business," and about a month later, 3,200 workers—roughly 20% of the console-maker's staff—were let go. Half lost their jobs immediately, with the rest to follow over the next year.
Xbox leadership says the "painful" cuts are needed to focus on blockbuster franchises like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, hoping to deliver new installments faster. But former employees argue the layoffs have wiped out decades of talent and experience.
"We knew something was going to happen, but not who or how much," Goin said. She estimates some teams at ZOS have been reduced to a quarter of their original size, severely limiting the studio's ability to produce regular updates for The Elder Scrolls Online.
Autumn Mitchell, a former senior QA tester at ZeniMax, said the month-long silence between Sharma's memo and the layoffs created unbearable uncertainty. "People were reading between the lines," she said. "Does it mean me? Does it mean my project?"
Simon Prefontaine, a game designer at Bethesda Game Studios' Montreal office, thought his team working on core franchises like Fallout would be safe. "We did not expect the scale of layoffs," he said. "We're stunned."
Andrew Willis, a producer at id Software—the studio behind Doom and Quake—found out he was laid off the day before a major expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages launched. He claims staff worked 12-17 hour days to finish the content, yet the studio cut nearly half its workforce, including many technical staff who had mastered id's proprietary engine. "They basically just threw it into the trash can," Willis said.
Xbox told the BBC it has "dozens of people working on ID Tech across multiple locations" and called reports that the Texas team was wiped out "inaccurate." It did not respond to claims about extended work hours.
The layoffs reflect a strategic shift away from former CEO Phil Spencer's bet on Game Pass, a subscription service that failed to attract enough users. Sharma's focus on tentpole franchises aims to address criticism that Xbox's biggest series have gone too long without new entries.
Industry analyst Fernando Rizo called the cuts "brutal" but questioned why flagship titles like Elder Scrolls VI have yet to materialize. "It's fair to ask why those big games haven't come out," he said.
For now, laid-off workers like Goin are left to pick up the pieces. "We're not going to be able to put out the amount of content at the speed that we were," she said. "Or anything approaching that."