After careful consideration, I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce our team by approximately 3,200 throughout FY27. This will include approximately 1,600 role eliminations today, and in addition, four studios will leave XBOX to new management.
Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will return to management and transition to independent studios with their IP, catalog, and runway for their next games. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have entered terms to join new ownership with funding to complete and grow Senua and State of Decay 3. In France, Arkane’s management is beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options.
It is remarkable that Microsoft owned Undead Labs for 9 years with 0 game releases and sold them off the year before their game comes out
That’s probably partly why they’re being sold off, unfortunately.
I admittedly have not played any of the State of Decay games, but is anyone expecting the third one to be a smash hit? That’s a long time to spend money on a studio to produce a game that might only sell modest numbers.
I suppose letting these studios return to being independent is technically an improvement over Microsoft just shutting them down.
This might be the first time in a long while studios didn’t just straight up closed by M$ but instead gone indie or sold off.
At this point I don’t know what Microsoft has been doing lately that isn’t about laying off thousands of people, but at least I’m very happy that all these companies have been spun out of Xbox. Double Fine might not be a 10/10 studio, but it’s great that they’re indie again and not part of a bipolar company that keeps threatening every company they own with layoffs due to management’s bad decisions.
In addition, Mojang and King will now report directly to me.
I appreciate how direct this post is compared to your average corpo-speak, but wow that sounds threatening as hell LOL.
Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management. […] We will reduce management layers to no more than 5, and where possible, 3.
14 layers of management is insane. Isn’t that like a month of going up and down the chain for simple decisions? No wonder they take forever making one game that turns out to be mediocre.
There’s a lot of talk about focusing on their bigger projects and being more hands-on with studios, which is worrying. Usually management messing with development makes the game worse.
14 layers is insane, but 3 to 5 is on the real low side for a $300B corp with lots of massive studios too. The vision presented is gonna be real awkward for companies working on more than 1 game at a time, or with huge 200+ employee teams. Activision-Blizzard-King in particular, World of Warcraft has a handful of sub-teams that have to coordinate stuff and Call of Duty runs on coordinated yearly releases.
I can easily imagine 7 layers for WoW or 8 layers for CoD. That’s not bloat, just the inevitable end-result of Satya Nadella being ultimately responsible for approving the salary of whoever’s writing the latest Call of Duty, the main project of a wholly owned subsidiary (the four studios making CoD on rotation) of an acquired company (Activision) of Microsoft’s side project gaming division (XBOX).
Never believe executive speak. I had a CFO claim to a large group of people that they were canceling the “free transit” passes once because someone used it 16 times in one day.
The passes dont even allow that due to a 2 hour grace period, nor would that be a good justification to screw over 2000 people with bus passes anyway, but it sure sounded like an outrageous abuse of the companies generosity, so thats the lie they told to justify it.
The reality is that it saved the company more than 100k/year, and the CFO was canceling any program that they didn’t personally benefit from that met that criteria.
Don’t most cities sell monthly unlimited use bus passes? I don’t know why you wouldn’t just issue those
Best possible outcome for those studios at least. Whether all the other changes have any positive impact, I guess we’ll see. I’m not too hopeful though.
What the fuck does 14 layers of management accomplish even
Nepotism?
Each layer siphon some of the money that’s supposed to pass down to the dev.
Those middle managers won’t middle manage themselves.
This is all MSFT spin.
The studios mentioned don’t all have enough funding to continue to be operational at their current burn rates. Those studios will be doing their own layoffs or may not survive at all.
Those studios account for under 30% of the 1600 jobs that MSFT is removing from their payroll today. As the day goes on there will be news that breaks of other studios under their banner that have layoffs which contribute to the total mentioned. It’s likely that their individual stories will be lost under this initial announcement.
She also mentioned that the big studio they currently owned will have their own cut too.
I cannot think of a less successful publisher than Microsoft. A wealth of titles and talent and they squandered entirely, cancelled everything that probably didn’t meet imaginary revenue targets and sent thousands of people to the street. They literally can’t release a fucking game to save their shitty subscription service. And now more get sent out to save money for their bullshit AI nonsense.
They should make mojang indie again.
And make id tech independent.I really want id to be independent. But that’s never going to happen.
I heard they want to spin off XBOX though
“The next decade of gaming will be larger, more global […]”
I’m positive this is just austerity measures after folding in activision. They’re probably finding more and more ways to offshore american and western european jobs to poorer nations where they can pay the employees less $$$.
Money is the only motivation. It’s not about producing better art, just more profits.
Probably needed considering how mediocre they’ve done this generation, but ouch. Also, I guess this means game pass didn’t pan out as a bet
They were merrily bleeding me every month until they bumped the price to £22/mo for my kids to basically play Minecraft and Lego star wars. Byeeee.
Some of the news is sad to see but I agree with you that something needed/needs to be done with Xbox.
Boycott Xbox
It’s pretty easy to do when they don’t want to own studios that make games anymore.
Not much left to boycott. Just don’t subscribe to Gamepass and that cuts off their only actual revenue stream left lmao.
https://nogamesforgenocide.com/
Please boycott XBOX for genocide at least. Everyone who bought Forza Horizon supported this
I sure hope all your consumption is completely legal then.
What an idiotic comment. Nobody is asking for you to boycott everything you don’t like, but we all have to draw our lines at some point, and looks like OP has done just that. You don’t have to like their line, but you also should not discourage others when they are trying to do something that’s more right than not.
Resetting Xbox? Wasn’t that a cool trick in like the Morrowind days, cmon guys, you pedophile defending scumbags need to come up with some new fucking material
