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.
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.
I appreciate how direct this post is compared to your average corpo-speak, but wow that sounds threatening as hell LOL.
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