As hundreds more Xbox developers lose their jobs, GameCentral asks whether they are necessary cutbacks or simply the latest step towards Microsoft giving up on gaming entirely. Perhaps the worst thing about Xbox's latest round of job cuts is knowing that there are over 1,300 more of them to come.
More than a thousand jobs still at risk
Microsoft announced back in July that they were cutting 'approximately 3,200' jobs within the next year, with 1,600 going that day. So Tuesday's announcement that 268 more people have been laid off still leaves over a thousand developers fearing for their jobs.
These are staggering numbers, each one an individual that no doubt viewed working in the games industry as a career highlight, if not a life goal. Many of them will be veterans with many years' worth of experience, who will no doubt view their treatment as encouragement to get out of the industry entirely. Institutional knowledge and experience, of the sort that takes decades to build, is being lost on a scale that has never been seen before in the industry, and it's not over yet.
Is this a plan to wind down Xbox?
Suggesting that Microsoft doesn't care is besides the point as it's never been clear that Microsoft, as an entity, cares about anything to do with video games. Most of the people working at Xbox do but there's been little sign from anyone outside the division that they view it as anything other than a minor distraction, a money drain that the company can easily afford but is increasingly irritated by.
There's one school of thought that new Xbox boss Asha Sharma was brought in to offer only palliative care, her true goal being to slowly and quietly bring an end to Microsoft's role in the games industry, so that the company loses as little face as possible when it eventually gives up entirely. That is a possibility and you could argue that this week's news is all part of that grand plan, as the number of semi-independent studios is drastically reduced, so that Activision and Bethesda are in charge of almost everything.
British developer Rare, who can trace their lineage all the way back to Ultimate Play the Game in the early 80s, is now under the direct control of the same publisher that has done almost nothing but publish Call Of Duty games for the last two decades. The next Halo is to be made by an unnamed Activision studio (implying it won't be out until well into the next decade); half of World's Edge, who handle the Age Of Empires franchise, have reportedly been laid off; Ninja Theory and Arkane Studios are likely going to be shut down; Obsidian Entertainment is now under Bethesda's aegis; and Turn 10 and Playground Games are to become one studio.
Can the business be saved?
Is this, as Xbox claims, a necessary attempt to streamline the business or has it just put all its game studios in a giant trash compactor, which will continue to squeeze and compress them until there's nothing left? If it is the latter, then there's not really much to discuss, as ordinary developers are forced to pay for the mistakes of incompetent management, that has so long been blamed for Xbox's problems but will inevitably be the last to go. But if this is a genuine attempt to save the business, can it work?
Asha Sharma may, by her own admission, not know much about video games, but she appears to be a competent businessperson. Even if she suffers from the typical Microsoft fault of not realising how her ghoulishly fake smiles, and assurances that the business is still doing great, come across when she's announcing that hundreds of people are losing their jobs.
If you were making a genuine effort to revive the business, then it's easy to see most of the purchases orchestrated by former boss Phil Spencer as a mistake that needs to be addressed. It's not going to be easy to offload Activision Blizzard now, even if they do regret the purchase, but the smaller bespoke developers, none of which were known for creating bestsellers or prominent IP, have now mostly all been dealt with. It's cruel and unfair, and a terrible waste of talent, but the mistake was Microsoft buying them in the first place, which was not Sharma's doing.
Acquiring Bethesda made more sense, especially as they were in financial trouble at the time, but Microsoft's complete inability to take advantage of the Fallout TV show's surprise success is another prime example of how slow and inefficient Xbox is as a business. Sharma has made it a point of saying that they should focus on their most popular properties and while that seems blindingly obvious it's something Xbox has been terrible at for two generations in a row now.
The future of Xbox hardware
If the new Halo does come out in, say, 2032 it will be over a decade since the last new game, which was itself a major disappointment. By that point there's a good chance it'll be too little, too late, which may already be the case for Gears Of War and this year's prequel E-Day. As a result, much depends on the reception to next year's Fable reboot, but how much can you really expect from a series that hasn't had a new mainline entry in 17 years and was never that acclaimed or successful in the first place?
Nevertheless, these games do represent Microsoft's best chance for the future, with The Elder Scrolls 6 another key title, for which a very important decision needs to be made about its potential exclusivity. The same is true for Hideo Kojima's OD and Physint, with Microsoft jumping in to save the latter after Sony tried to cancel it, a move that seemed more like an overly eager attempt to get one over on Sony than it did a sound business decision.
But ultimately, it's not the games that are the root of the Xbox games business. Microsoft can happily go on as a third party publisher without any problem but for the Xbox name to mean something they have to have a hardware platform – or a widely used streaming service. At the moment they have neither. The Xbox Series X/S has been a complete disaster and considering their recent changes to how you pay for streaming, one can only assume that's not going well either.
Microsoft is keen to insist that the next gen Project Helix is real and will be released soon but what is it? If it's a traditional console it's impossible to imagine that it can be a mass market success, given the decline in the Xbox hardware business and the inevitably high price of the new console. Could they make a success of some sort of cheaper, redesigned Xbox Series X? Perhaps a hybrid console in the style of the rumoured new PlayStation device? Perhaps, but what would be the selling point to anyone that isn't already part of the Xbox ecosystem, considering PlayStation and Nintendo already exist as far more viable alternatives?
Only Microsoft currently knows the answer to that but unless it's a good one, it's difficult to see any future for Xbox as anything other than a third party publisher. And if that's all it's to become then it's very likely Microsoft will just try to sell the division off to someone else. An ignoble end to a business that, in the last decade, has caused nothing but trouble for everyone involved.
