https://www.vgchartz.com/article/465113/microsoft-laying-off-as-many-as-9000-employees-includes-layoffs-at-xbox-division/

This figure represents about 4% of Microsoft's total workforce; the Xbox division had around 20,000 employees as of last year.

The Initiative, the studio behind the Perfect Dark reboot, is reportedly also being shut down.

Sad news :(

Especially for Perfect Dark - just outsource the IP already....

If it's true that Perfect Dark's "gameplay" trailer last year was faked and they still had no working build after 5 YEARS they deserve to be let go. I know people will get mad at me saying this, but if you cannot do your job then you don't deserve to keep it. This is also on Microsoft. How did they not take the initiative (pun not intended) to come in years ago and can the project or reboot it? There's a reason you never announce games too early.

Yeah... I think most of us like to always focus on the publisher themselves and feel the cancellation/ closing of a studio isn't justified. THe studio itself was formed back in 2018 and if all they had wer evertical slices then I think it's not surprising MS just cut their losses. 

STILL

Management should've stepped in earlier to course correct if milestones were not being hit, or MS should've had stricter milestones. At the end of day, MS is still to blame (even if only partially).  And when you take this news in connection with all the other studios (who have seemingly had similar issues releasing games, there's clearly a bigger issue at play here.

Honestly, seems like MS just doesn't care about their studios or their people. And that's what makes this worse. I want to say thoughts and prayers but those words are meaningless I guess. I can only hope that as many of those who were affected can find some work.

If those reports are true than yeah I can't argue against the game getting cancelled. The trailer looked good, but a little suspicious. I remember Digital Foundry questioning how real it actually was. 

Either way all these layoffs suck. I wonder how many regular employees laid off would be equivalent to just one executive being let go. 

Not surprised about EverWild.

That was the one that looked more like a proof of concept right? where it was like "now we need to build a game around our idea" thing.
I feel like it was shown off so many times with differnt looks, it was clear they didn't really have strong direction with it.
Stuff like that is bound to end up a mess.
 
Perfect dark cancelled is a surprise. Alot of xbox guys were looking forwards to that one.

While some of the people laid off are supposedly Sales/Marketing people, the article quotes alot of studios with people going away.
"User research & Quality Controll" cut in half... is also a surprise.

9,000 is alot of people.

Wild and Everwild: Fate of the Wild. Hand in hand into extinction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_(video_game)

Breath of the Wild took all the success out of other pesky "wilds". But seriously, these layoffs are getting outrageous. I hope they'll find better jobs and soon.

Honestly with what A.I is going to do to the field....  I think alot of programmers are going to get the axe in the next 2-4 years time.
(so getting a job in Gaming in the next few years is probably not going to be easy)

Edit:
Alot of voice actors and real actors (for mo-cap) will probably get replaced as well (at first not in movies for tv/cinema) but for games where its already 3d models. Its just cheaper to have a computer simulate stuff, than paying people to do these things.

Its not just programmers, Art can be generated by A.I for 3d model assets in games, at the click of a button.
I think this will hurt lawyers too, like... alot of the tedious work parts, that a human would do, a computer can do much faster.
If it gets good enough at it, we might be listening to A.I created music in the future (ei. hurting singers ect).

You want a job that A.I is unlikely to replace? 
Start training to be a plumber, electrician or something like that.

How is any of this relevant to the topic at hand?

Well rumor says the voice actors used in Halo are all gone.
They are being replaced by A.I in future titles of halo.

Looks like a lot of studios and people from both the Zenimax and Activision/Blizzard acquisitions were hit as well. This further cements my belief that the deals were much more about IPs and rights than actual talent.

This is one of the greatest issues of the mega-corporation structure as a business model - you'll have people at the top making absurd amounts of money, and companies can even be in the black, but not as much as shareholders would like. This then leads to the mass-firing of people further down the ladder, with memos referring to "strategy" and "aim". If all these people who were fired were part of individual, or smaller efforts, and not under the ownership of one huge entity; it's very unlikely that as many of them, if any at all, would be getting kicked out now. And what's happening now is the exact reason why some of us were so negative to these acquisitions by Microsoft to begin with. It turns out that all the hollering about how good this was for the industry and every party in it, were all hollow words, precisely as some of us said at the time.

Google says last earnings call, they reported profits of over 70.1$ billion USD, and that this "exceeded Wall Street expectations".

Its not because MS is having trouble earning money, they are letting people go.
That much is for sure.