My thoughts on the hiring at XGS this past 30 days or so:

-Playground had a very odd month. For the first time in I think over 18 months, they lost devs, and they closed a ton of open job listings. Not sure what is going on, but hopefully things return to normal on the next update.

-Ninja Theory has lost devs 3 months in a row now I think. Not sure what is happening there either, could just be the last few of the original Bleeding Edge 16 person team getting laid off after Bleeding Edge flopped hard. Hopefully they start expanding again soon.

-Mojang has now had 2 months in a row with 20 hires. At this rate they will soon surpass 343 as Xbox's largest studio. They must be staffing up for multiple projects, they implied in that video about their name change earlier this year that they had new IP in development in addition to Minecraft games.

-Zenimax Online now has alot of open positions. They seem to be planning for a huge staff up for their new IP.

I'm thinking of something else entirely I guess. The thing I was remembering was a lineup of 5 or 6 concept characters, each with different clothing aesthetics, some male, some female. MS released it in a monthly feedback survey as I recall, like 3 or 4 years ago, asking people which of the 5 characters was their favorite. Lead to many speculating at the time that MS might choose the winner as the protagonist in an upcoming game, but none of them actually showed up in a game afaik. Maybe those 2 above were in that line-up, but I don't think they were. Could be wrong though. The girl with the pink jacket and blonde hair does look kind of familiar, maybe she was in that line-up. I'd have to find the original line-up picture to be sure though, and I tried in vain to find it last night. 

An update on the size and hiring at Microsoft's 1st party studios, last update was about a month ago:

Sources: LinkedIn and studio websites

Note: World's Edge doesn't have a LinkedIn page, as they are classified as part of Microsoft due to having their headquarters at Microsoft's Redmond Washington campus, but they had 40+ devs by the end of 2019, at last official update. Roundhouse does not have a public LinkedIn page, nor are they listed on Zenimax's career site, so I have no idea how many open positions they have, but I counted 43 people working there via a LinkedIn search.

275 as of 2017, now at 355 according to LinkedIn. They are pretty big, 3rd biggest Sony studio:

1. Naughty Dog- 456
2. Guerilla Games- 380
3. Insomniac- 355
4. Santa Monica Studio- 200+ (a year outdated)
5. Polyphony- 170ish
6. Sucker Punch- 159
7. Bend Studio- 136 (a year out of date)
8. Media Molecule- 50 (several years out of date)
9. Pixelopus- 9 (several years out of date)
10. Japan Studio- ???
11. London Studio- ???
12. Malaysia Studio- ???
13. San Diego Studio- ???
14. San Mateo Studio- ???

Those last 5 I can't find any size info for, none of the 5 of them have individual LinkedIn pages, people who work at those are just listed as working at Sony, along with about 9000 other people, it's the same with Microsoft and World's Edge, the people who work at World's Edge are just listed as working at Microsoft.

As for Insomniac, it's speculated that they really only have 2 teams now. A larger one which did Spider-Man in 2018 and then really quickly did the Miles Morales standalone expansion for 2020 by reusing as many assets as possible, and a smaller one, maybe 100-150 devs, on Ratchet & Clank. 

Christ CDPR, what a disaster, vindicating me saying Microsoft shouldn't acquire them but for different reasons, that management team is downright awful, from the crunch to the forced release in an awful state to throwing Microsoft and Sony under the bus, management deserves nothing less than all being fired but that can't happen obviously, hopefully the tanking share price forces them out.

Eh, I'll save it for my later post but Cyberpunk has a lot more issues than simply bugs, a lot of it feels 10 years out of date and massively undercooked, the Writing & Gunplay/Combat save it but everything else? Not even close to being the best, far behind the likes of Rockstar and there's nothing I see which shouldn't have been doable on last gen consoles.

On the bug side, I've experienced quite a lot, perhaps more than I've ever experienced in a game for a long time, I've had to re-load my save dozens of times to fix bugged quests, thankfully nothing major game breaking yet but I am on Series X, its performance on last gen consoles is unacceptable and they (management) pushed it out under harsh crunch knowing full well it was broken in order to not piss off investors and decrease their share price.

No doubt in my mind that CDPR is 100% to blame here, upper management, not the developers, I feel sorry for the developers crunching their asses off knowing they're releasing a broken game but being forced to release it so their bosses can keep that ridiculous $8bn valuation, well, that's backfired and deservedly so, maybe it will make CDPR more humble in the future.

Not to mention, they had extremely shady review practices, they straight up knew the game was a mess, they only sent PC codes out, they didn't allow reviewers to record their own gameplay, they were purposely trying to avoid reviews to be made on consoles...Just shady, if any other company did this they'd be slaughtered, EA would be called the most evil company in America again (Fuck EA dou).

I'm just annoyed! I frigging loved CDPR, Witcher 3 was one of my favourite RPGs ever and one of my favourite games of last gen and then they do this...All of this is self inflicted, Goddamn idiots...Cyberpunk could have been amazing, could have been so much better, but the pursuit of money came first.

Money corrupts Maybe they are decent guys, but Witcher 3 blew their company up to insane proportions, their share price absolutely soared, they flew too close to the sun.