Bloomberg's Jason Schreier is reporting ZeniMax will be facing a "significant overhaul and will pivot to focus on its biggest franchises: Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein."

All in all, not as bad as the doom and gloom fears:

• Nothing closed as of yet. Plans to divest all 5 with no studio closures, only Arkane not divested yet
• Xbox has over 20,000 employees, 3200 over the fiscal year still leaves them with around 17,000 between Xbox Game Studios, Activision Blizzard, and Zenimax divisions. With no closures, these layoffs are "trimming the fat", in other words Asha hopes to get as much development done with less developers, by using automation tools and such, something most publishers and studios will be doing in the coming years, as development team sizes grew unsustainably large over the course of this generation (an average AA now has as many devs as a AAA 15 years ago, and single A/indie teams are at like 50 devs now, as many as a AA like 15 years ago)

Honestly doesn't sound like that significant of an overhaul, the only game they were known to be working on as of 2026 that wasn't in one of those franchises was Marvel's Blade which will be divested alongside Arkane presumably, after Zenimax Online's new IP Kestrel was killed like 2 years ago (after like 8 years of development and slow progress), and Roundhouse merged with Zenimax Online and stopped developing a rumored Prey game around the same time, all they had in development was Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout 5 (pre-production), Wolfenstein 3, Doom: The Dark Ages (until it's 2025 release), a rumored Quake game at id since 2025, and Marvel's Blade at Arkane. 

If anything, this reads like Bethesda will likely end up split into 2 teams so that they can work on Elder Scrolls and Fallout at the same time finally, something the fans have wanted for years.

No studio closures and no game cancellations was the best possible scenario.

I was shocked when Asha mentioned that the platform team grew by 40% since the start of the gen…..i think we all figured that team was gutted a long time ago.

Kinda funny that Mojang and King are being taken away from Booty’s oversight. I was hoping he was going to be part of the layoffs.

This was always going to terrible to hear the extent of how many are getting laid off. Hoping Arkane finds a buyer asap!

Other than the number of people laid off this feels like the best case scenario with no studios closing or games being cancelled. The platform team growing by 40% this gen is crazy, so makes sense they will be hit the hardest. 

Also, it reads like they are still financing State of Decay 3 and Senua through to release even though they found buyers for both studios. I presume the same with Blade, financing it through to release even after a buyer for Arkane is found.

Yeah, 40% growth for the platform team over this generation, even as Series S/X sales fell behind XB1, and even as Gamepass shrank, is wild to me. Also this from Asha's letter: "Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management." 14 layers is absolutely insane, and it's not the first time I've heard about AAA having crazy large layers of management approvals, a former AAA dev in the 2000's once said that there were typically 3 layers of management then (department head, studio management, and publisher approval team), now from junior dev on up, work has to be approved by (senior dev, supervisor, department head, interdepartmental head, studio management, and multiple layers of publisher approval now). We've even heard stories of devs working on stuff for a month, because the next layer of management only checks work monthly instead of weekly, and then scrapping a whole month of that developer's work. Now imagine that across multiple layers. 14 layers is the worst I've ever heard though. AAA has grown ridiculously over bloated and over managed, no doubt about that.

Being reported now that Blade has gone over budget and is now internally delayed. Most likely the reason why Arkane is being sold off.

I hate to say it but I do hope the majority of the layoffs are in the platform team and its bloated layers of management. Rather than the development studios. 

For those wondering why Asha seems to be pushing a return to exclusives.