Either way BOTH have laid off thousands of employees. Bungie alone went from 1,600 when acquired and is now down to 400 or so. Xbox is laying off ~2,500 this fiscal year. (3,200 figure includes the studios leaving Xbox, so subtracting their estimated number of employees). Xbox laid off 1,900 or so last year if I recall.

Tens of thousands have been laid off across gaming in the last few years.

Yep, when you look at it Xbox and Playstation both grew too much too quickly (in Xbox's case, they grew too much trying to expand their gamepass catalogue with more varied games, in Sony's case they grew too much chasing GaaS during the Covid gaming spending boom).

Yeah and now both are cutting costs...while raising prices. Though hardware going up is due to storage and memory costs increasing so much. You can blame Microsoft partially for that as they are investing in AI along with so many other companies. 

I still don't know what their reset plan is or what they expect it just sounds like less games in general, less games in Gamepass, less exclusives and no new IP and none of that makes me want to keep investing into Xbox as a platform and I doubt any non Xbox owners will see any reason to either with $800 Series X and $1000+ next gen consoles on the horizon.

I think the plan is to put more focus on its biggest IPs - Halo Gears, Fable, Forza Horizon, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Diablo, etc - to get new releases out sooner. 

The biggest issue out of their control is the price of hardware. IMO they need a weaker next-gen Xbox that is only a little more powerful than a Series X. But make it slimmer. 

Probably something with gamepass next because we havn't had an update in a while gameswise.

The reset seems to be:

• Less focus on Gamepass and multiplat releases because the increase in revenue from those didn't compensate for the loss in software sales or Xbox hardware sales
• Trimming the fat off of and streamlining development which has grown over middle managed and over bloated in general
• Focusing primarily on core franchises with high sales (Halo, Gears, Forza Horizon, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Wolfenstein, etc.), after about two dozen new IP or revived IP gambles in the Spencer years that didn't pay off (new IP/revived IP from 1st and 2nd party that underperformed or were cancelled in the Spencer years include Scalebound, Project Spark, D4, Sunset Overdrive, Quantum Break, ReCore, Phantom Dust, Zoo Tycoon, Crackdown, Bleeding Edge, Battletoads, Tell Me Why, As Dusk Falls, Ara History Untold, South of Midnight, Keeper, Kiln, Avowed, Towerborne, and Perfect Dark). For all those new and revived IP that underperformed or were cancelled in the Spencer years, they had just 4 successes as best as I can remember, Ori and the Blind Forest, Sea of Thieves, Age of Empires 4, and Microsoft Flight Simulator, and of those only Sea of Thieves actually produced truly large revenue figures for them, the others made more than their budget but not so big as to be considered huge successes for a corporation that deals in the quantities of money that Microsoft does

Yes, the hardware will be expensive, that is unavoidable for both Sony and Xbox these days, that is likely why they are focusing on core franchises and exclusives, if Halo and Forza Horizon as full exclusives, and possibly even timed exclusivity on Elder Scrolls 6, can't move the $1000+ Project Helix, nothing can. 

Looks like a third of id Software is getting laid off and half of the ESO team.

Not too surprised, id was oversized for the way that Doom: The Dark Ages performed, they have like 350 devs but apparently almost all of them were on Doom: The Dark Ages until it released, barely any on Quake reboot which was in preproduction. The Dark Ages did have 3m players in the first week which was a record for the franchise, but analysts estimated that only 800k of those 3m were sales, the other 2.2m day one Gamepass players, in terms of sales it is estimated to have sold less than half as much as Doom Eternal in 2020 sold at launch. 

As for ESO, it's just not maintaining enough players at this point to justify almost 500 devs all on ESO expansions since Kestrel was cancelled about a year ago. ESO has fallen to #149 on Xbox's most played list and #173 on Steam. Almost 500 devs entirely on a game with something like 25k daily active players across all platforms, is just way too many.

It is my impression that this is a correct assessment.