Here's a more in depth (or rather long winded) article about the recent (and earlier) layoffs. (without ever mentioning the controversial effects of gamepass)
Putting the blame ultimately on Nadella, but mostly on the lack of management as focus has shifted. (And those are not the people fired)
https://www.eurogamer.net/xboxs-absent-landord-execs-are-only-part-of-a-much-bigger-problem
Some excerpts
The vibe has shifted. We've had enough of the disasters now - more than enough - where the attempts at providing reasonable business cases for "organizational shifts", or whatever the latest placative, idiomatic glibness from this lot is, don't so much ring hollow as they do sound a great summoning bell of absolute white-hot rage.
Maybe we didn't absolutely need another Zenimax MMO, to pick one, very unfairly, of a seemingly endless array of examples. And maybe it really was quite likely to struggle on release, because we've seen this more than enough times now, with all the other expensive, ultimately failed live-service punts from the big dogs in recent years, to know how it probably goes (even with its reportedly cool traversal mechanics and likelihood of, given the talent involved, actually being really quite good).
Zenimax's project Blackbird, which really did sound cool and which I have written off incredibly unfairly for dramatic purposes here, is also only the start of it. As our extraordinarily bleak roundup summarises, Microsoft's dripping axe has also swung for the Perfect Dark reboot, the entire Forza Motorsport series, hundreds of people at mobile megastudio King, potentially the whole studio of Romero Games, and most ludicrously of all, Everwild.
Everwild's case is ludicrous not because it was cancelled but because it was allowed to continue unaided for so long. As my new colleague Alex Donaldson wisely pointed out, projects like Everwild - and similarly Perfect Dark, and I'm sure many more - have floundered for years. It's not unfeasible to suggest Everwild might have been cancelled, shelved, or reworked much earlier, when trouble started to show and when jobs could be far more easily saved. This game was announced six years ago and was reportedly in development for over a decade. A decade! What has Xbox, its publisher, been doing all this time?
The circumstances which have led to the likes of Everwild and Perfect Dark being cancelled are not sudden occurrences, not surprise market shifts, headwinds, pandemic hangovers or minor miscalculations. This is a publisher utterly failing in its duty.
These are not cursed projects or impossible ideas, nor wild, incompetent, untamable studios. They're games being made by people who are profoundly experienced and in many cases genuinely revered. Gregg Mayles, Rare's longest-serving developer, out in the latest bloodbath, had been there since 1989, joining the studio at 18 years old. Matt Firor, also gone - reportedly in protest at his team's widely-praised project getting canned - founded Zenimax Online Studios and had been there as its head for 18 years, overseeing the incredibly rare feat of running an actually successful MMO into 2025 with conviction and vision. These are instead creative projects that hit obstacles - maybe impassable obstacles - and were then simply left to continue banging their heads against them while their supposed custodians and ultimate bosses were busy buying more studios, turning the video game funding model on its head, and fighting the FTC, EU, and Competition Markets Authority to assemble their industry-gobbling megapublisher.
And the likes of Everwild sting, too, because this has happened before. In fact it's not just happened before, it's happened before that too! To the point where I've already done the article going "this has happened before" just last year. The echoes thrown up by the nightmare at Rare and co. here in 2025 harken back to fellow British development institution Lionhead, of course (via Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks and the many more inbetween). A closure that happened in 2016, two years after Everwild's development got started and a year before it was revealed. Phil Spencer was there, at Lionhead, in 2014. He was part of Xbox's senior team when it was shuttered. That was his big lesson. The one do-over. The tortuous but, they say, necessary call that led he and Sarah Bond put out a video vowing never again.
Now, not just Firor and Mayles, or the Romeros, or even the old experts of Lionhead are out of a job. It's hundreds and hundreds more, career professionals from Zenimax, King, The Initiative, Turn 10, Blizzard, Halo Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Raven Software, Sledgehammer Games, High Moon Studios, Infinity Ward, Demonware and probably more. Those on top of Microsoft and Xbox's hefty share of the more than 17,000 developers laid off last year, the 8,000 the year before and 7,000 the year before that who are all out too.
When developers of conviction and expertise leave, at this extraordinary scale, video games only get worse.
Satya Nadella, who leads Microsoft on a desperate crusade to the promised land of AI, by any and all means necessary, will always bear ultimate responsibility. Which is why it's always tempting to offer some sympathy for those like Xbox's undynamic trio and their business accomplices. But then that sympathy is soon extinguished when you keep doing it. That goes double when you open a contemptible letter to those affected with boasts of "more players, games, and gaming hours than ever before" and a gaming business roadmap that has "never looked stronger". And when you set it against a share price at an all time high.
That price, of course, comes in large part from Nadella's unrestrained riding of the environmentally destructive, plagiaristic, disinformation-fuelling generative AI bubble (don't come for me about calling it a bubble: I'm just echoing what this Goldman Sachs AI analyst said!). This may seem like a sudden gear-shift, but if we're scratching heads for a true driving force here beyond the many other, still-present factors impacting gaming's business malaise - from the hangover of Covid-induced investor overoptimism, to shifts in the attention economy - it's this. The big boss has a big idea, that big idea is awfully expensive, and when that happens the margins of everything else tend to suddenly get much finer. The impact of those tight margins is then magnified a thousand times when said boss runs a company that owns such vast waves of a creative industry.
But it's also a signifier of something else. Namely Microsoft leadership's apparent, deeply concerning inability to think about anything like a normal human. More than that actually, it's the utter contempt for humanity itself (all of this putting its mealy-mouthed denial of its AI and cloud software's involvement in any "harm" in Palestine aside, of course).
As even AI's biggest proponents will usually admit, it is fundamentally incapable of actually learning anything. Creative industries such as video games are human ones, existing because of deeply human urges, irrepressible natures and drives. Drives which run in direct opposition to the horrifying inhumanity of the people who run them.
