This seems to be becoming a trend with pretty much all large third-party publishers. They are reducing their output and focusing on a few big games, which they support with content for a longer period of time (aka games as a service). I don't know if increased development costs without an increase in video game prices has anything to do with this trend or if it just comes down to reducing the number of projects and focusing on only a few in order to reduce costs (its probably a mix of both of these things, as they do overlap with each other), but it seems like large third-party publishers have largely become risk averse and hesitant to work on projects that are smaller than their big established AAA games.

High Moon was also used prior to Destiny for last gen CoD porting as well. All they had was two shots at the War for Cybertron series and then they were cut short, a damn shame if you ask me, because I really loved what they did with Transformers. So far they have been the only devs out there to make the kind of Transformers game I've always wanted. 

Ya it's a shame that a bunch of their studios that used to make AA games have been axed or reduced to support studios.

In the last ~5 years their internal output has pretty much consisted of the annual Call of Duty and annual kid friendly game (formerly Skylanders, now Crash/Spyro remakes) and they dont publish games from outside developers nearly as much as they used to.

I think he was being sarcastic... right?

He is being sarcastic but doesn't mean it won't make a profit.

Well MS may pick these guys for their growing studios, or Sony may open some more teams or absorb the talents on what they already have.

Layoffs and hiring are very recurrent stuff.

Some not that much (people that work on labor intensive phase and aren't permanent staff, some certainly get made full time, others will help on other projects and keep independent), but when talking about really losing the job, yes it is a sad truth.

Problem with most games in the industry is that they sell top heavy, for companies to be truly viable with a strong cash flow their games must have long legs, this is rarely the case even if a game sells tremendous amounts in its first month it often drops fast leaving less and less to keep employees in the long term

Hence why microtransactions, lootboxes and the like were created, they allow the publishers to make pretty consistent amounts of money outside of sales. Money that these publishers earned before by making smaller, more niche titles, but with the extra income they're getting in the games, they don't need to develop those anymore. Just have a look at all the big western publishers and the games they develop and publish every year; you can count them easily on one hand while in the past, both hands weren't enough.