Thurrott was reporting on a reorganisation too, I imagine they're just going to gut everything which isn't a major IP or any New IP they don't think will be a mega hit, AAAs and playing it as safe as possible, I wonder if Phil does these layoffs and then fucks off and hands Sarah the reins to clean up the mess. He probably should, he is not repairing his image now, at least Sarah has a chance to have a fresh slate after Phil/Satya are done wiping wiping out chunks of Microsoft Gaming.

Double Fine need to leave Xbox while they still can because they definitely don't fit into Xbox's future, I just hope they would be able to fund themselves independently in California still, IIRC Double Fine did say the acquisition contract had a clause in it that they could spin back out as an independent entity if things go tits up, which they are now. A-AAs don't interest Satya.

Anyway...

the Xbox app on Windows is now showing Steam games, and the settings for the new Xbox full screen experience on handhelds is starting to show for some Ally owners 🤯👀 / thx to @RGVetGaming for the tip 🙏

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— Tom Warren (@tomwarren.co.uk) 26 June 2025 at 18:36

I'm looking forward to getting the Rog Ally X later this year, I hope it slowly gets me into PC Gaming and by the time I'm fully into it, Rockstar are releasing GTA's on PC on day one, Lmao. Suppose it's a good thing that GTA only releases once every 10 years now, at least if I go fully PC I won't be missing out on much and the pros will significantly outweigh not getting GTA on launch.

Nvidia, Microsoft Stocks Set Fresh All-Time Highs Thursday

🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮

Unfortunately that’s the reality of ABK buying Xbox and going all in on a sub service. I mean when you have COD in Game Pass releasing yearly you don’t really need the Compulsions and the Ninja Theory’s or the Double Fines when their games likely don’t bring in any subs (compared to ABK) and the top boss is probably looking at that and wondering why they even need most of those studios. You either move the sub count up or you’re out.

You do, because CoD only releases once a year. These studios were acquired precisely because of Game Pass, it keeps people engaged all year round. The issue is typical American capitalism bullshit, they need the line to go up faster, only bigger games can do that, without Game Pass they never would have acquired these studios in the first place and they'd probably have shut down everything already aside from the mega hits. But it's clear now that Game Pass original purpose can no longer save these studios/games because it "only" reached ~40m (so far) instead of some ridiculous number like 100m-200m but even if it reached that we'd eventually come to a point where Microsoft would say "Hmm. We have 100m subs now. Bringing in massive amount of money...Buuuuuut....THE LINE ISN'T INCREASING FAST ENOUGH. WE NEED MORE" and we'd be back to square one with mass layoffs and cancellations. Why? American Capitalism, Lol. 

Plus the entire tech industry right now is laying off a massive amount, the tech industry laid off 264k employees in 2023, 152k employees in 2024 and so far have laid off 63k employees in 2025. It's disgusting. The gaming industry in particular is being slammed. The only companies not being complete dickheads right now are Valve, Nintendo and a few Japanese companies. The American market in particular is shitting itself hard but Canada and UK are also suffering badly, the UK videogame industry right now for the UK is awful, but then again, pretty much everything is awful in the UK right now economically. None of this justifies their layoffs though, cause these fuckwits still make record profits, but if some bullshit line doesn't go up fast enough to please their fellow millionaire investors then it's time to punish your workers and treat them like disposable trash.

Microsoft’s Xbox PC launcher gets going with Steam, Epic, and other games showing up. The new library experience is showing up for testers, and it's really easy to get access to this new Xbox PC version. Details below 👇 www.theverge.com/hands-on/693...

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— Tom Warren (@tomwarren.co.uk) 26 June 2025 at 19:51

Parris: "launching a Steam game via the Xbox App on PC" — Bluesky

This is actually really cool, I thought it would be a little more in your face but it's seamless, it's just like loading up a native Windows Store game, I should really move to PC already, Lol.

Bought glover on sale and also ended up playing a ton of small games that I finally started up (got + 100.000 achievement score this month by doing so).

Spray Pain simulator got a ton of updates including save in progress and a difficulty slider (really was a pain in the ass without it). Anyway game is easy now if you want 1000 GS.

Ryuu what are you going on about. Its like you woke up yesterday and did not realize that this huge corporation called MS acts like a huge US corporation. Phill doesn't care about his image to you or anyone else outside of MS just like Bobby did not care. The only metric for Phil is success, revenue and profit. All that other stuff means nothing as long as MS gaming is hitting those other goals. None of these corporations are angles so why even be shocked. If cuts need to be made and top brass says you need to cut 10% of staff, you cut 10%. The only solid thing you can always count on is that MS is always going to do what they believe is best for MS and it really doesn't matter who is in charge.

Knowing why it happens doesn't mean you need to be happy with it happening, doesn't mean you should just cheer along as these scummy capitalist companies treat their employees like disposable trash all to make some line go up super fast instead of just fast, this American Capitalism is toxic and doomed to fail in the future when everything inevitably stagnates. And yes, I know all American public companies are this way, why would I comment on them all individually in here though, it's the Microsoft thread and Microsoft is doing the layoffs every 6 months.

Microsoft has already scorched its reputation amongst the consumer market too, now Satya is insistent on torching Xbox's reputation amongst the consumer market too, because Microsoft does not understand the consumer market, at all, they don't understand the entertainment business. They only see lines on a graph and that's all they understand. You also can't expect your workers to do their best work when they're living in constant fear of being laid off and it doesn't matter what they do, nobody is safe, Microsoft employee and specifically Xbox employee morale is going to take a nosedive off a cliff which will result in worse employee retention and worse product releases and I can't blame the workers one bit, why should they bother putting 100% in when they'll just get laid off anyway.

Also, I could make an excuse for Zenimax and Activision-Blizzard but if they touch any of the 2018 XGS acquisitions, you know, the same ones whom when acquiring they told; "We're acquiring you for Game Pass which will be a safety net, I Phil Spencer want you to do whatever you want, to have the freedom to make whatever you want, don't worry about anything else" only to shut them down when they followed that? Yeah, Phil can piss off too if that is the case, he straight up lied to their faces about being safe. I don't know how he could still be respected by his employees either after going through multiple thousands of employee layoffs, the toxicity inside of MS Gaming towards the executive staff will almost certainly be high if the worst case scenario happens, but I suppose all we can do is wait and see.

Phil's also to blame for promising Satya the moon and only delivering the sky, his promise of 100m+ Game Pass subscribers and xCloud taking over the world, or $32 billion revenues by 2030 which is in 5 years from now and they currently are about $7bn short, there is no chance they're reaching that if they start going through cancellations, closures, etc. Unless they acquire another publisher, another to layoff thousands after telling the FTC it wouldn't be needed like they did with ABK, Lol. If you're an Xbox studio capable of doing so you should be planning right now on getting back your independence, Microsoft are blatant liars and if any XGS are touched then so is Phil.

But again, Xbox isn't even doing bad right now, Xbox is at an all time high revenue and is expected to grow 6-9% this quarter, they are a profitable business before Activision-Blizzard "in the low-single digits (billions)" and Activision-Blizzard in itself was a billion dollar profitable business. Microsoft Gaming profits continue to grow every quarter as pointed out every quarterly report by Satya, Game Pass continues to grow as reported by NPD every quarter, Microsoft Gaming is singled out as being the reason that "More Personal Computing" profits increased overall, they're about to have a record breaking Q4. The business is actually pretty healthy right now but for Microsoft that's not good enough, it's not fast enough.

We can even see because it's public knowledge that all their UK studios are profitable as well, Lol. But apparently they're being hit with layoffs too.

America has God awful employee protection laws too and these companies like Microsoft take advantage of it, the reason why Japan has such fewer layoffs is because they have actual laws to protect their employees and make it harder to just mass layoff people. But yes, all billion dollar public American corporations are soulless assholes, I'm only focusing on MS because this is the MS thread.

But look, I'll stop posting until we actually see the layoffs, because it might turn out the XGS 2018 acquisitions are fine, or it's mostly a consolidation of business units, but based on reports from Bloomberg, Thurrott, that other dude, it sounds like the layoffs are going to be a huge amount, every studio is reporting as being worried right now, I'm expecting the worst and hoping for as little damage as possible.