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Otter on 08 July 2025
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curl-6 said:
smroadkill15 said:

These 9000 layoffs were global wide across the entire company. If it was only Xbox, I would agree, but it wasn't. Xbox just had it's best quarter in gaming and was profitable. We already know MS is investing heavily into AI and these layoffs are happening the same time this is happening. We know MS wants to save money with AI by cutting jobs. This was always going to happen, no matter how successful Xbox was. 

Many of the layoffs were at Xbox; the Initiative shut down, half of Turn 10 gone, Blizzard, High Moon, Compulsion, Undead Labs, etc.

If Gamepass were really so amazing and successful, there wouldn't be so many devs on the chopping block, they would have cut jobs elsewhere.

Gamepass doesn't make every studio or game an equally worthy investment... So across the board the weakest segments within their divisions were cut. Gaming is not excluded from this but it was not the main focus either.  This is why Nintendo especially is so important as gaming is their primary income, and sony too to a lessor extent... 

But just to clarify these cuts are not about gamepass. It's about low-profit areas that microsoft wants to sacrifice for AI across the whole business and yes that means games that have been in development hell or teams that did not generate enough interest in their recent releases on or off gamepass. But this is also means some of these games/projects would have been perceived as potentially profitable but simply less so than 200m spent on more AI resources.

Last edited by Otter - on 08 July 2025