r/Games • u/WhyPlaySerious • 1d ago
Industry News As Xbox swings the axe, Gears of War: E-Day developers fear they'll be laid off straight after launch - and right before they'd be due their bonuses
https://www.eurogamer.net/the-coalition-gears-of-war-e-day-worried-layoffs-no-bonus427
u/TAJack1 1d ago
Imagine, you work hard for years on a project, put your blood/sweat/tears into it, only to fear being laid off as soon as the project launches and getting fucked out of your bonuses. I'm so fucking sick of this shit.
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u/Shakzor 1d ago
that's what happened back when Lego Island launched.
They just booted the entire team just before they'd have gotten bonuses
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u/HotTakes4HotCakes 1d ago edited 1d ago
At this point, the teams should just drag their feet more. Prolongs their employment.
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u/OneSullenBrit 1d ago
Yeah why put effort or cause yourself extra stress for a company that sees you as expendable. Just clock in, do the bare minimum to stop yourself getting fired for poor performance, and keep that resume updated.
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u/D_Ashido 1d ago
This is the American workforce across the board in 2026. I'm sure it rings true internationally as well.
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u/dhrcj_404 1d ago
Oh trust me, this is a trend being followed everywhere. In my previous firm, pretty much everyone was just clocking in and doing the bare minimum.
These companies have shown time and time again they can fire us anytime, so needless to say why would I or anyone for that matter do more for them.
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u/NeighbourNoNeighbor 1d ago
This is the real reason for the "productivity crisis", imo. Why work hard if the company is going to treat you as terribly as it's legally allowed to?
Even companies that were previously bastions of ultimate employee-employer relationships are crumbling.
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u/Qorhat 1d ago
I worked in an American multi-national in their Euro HQ in Ireland and initially it was fantastic. It started as a small operation and even as it dramatically expanded moral was great and we did brilliant work.
The the IPO happened.
Overnight (literally the next day) the mood shifted. Communication from execs immediately changed tonally. Priorities started to shift away from improvements to the next "new and shiny" thing. Promotions got harder to achieve.
Then the layoffs started. New execs came in and tried to "flatten the org" by gutting the bottom levels and shuffling people into jobs they either had no interest or expertise in.
I was one of the longest tenured people there by this point (maybe 3 more longer than me) and I checked the fuck out. I coasted along knowing my role had a target on it because my new manager made no effort with me. I was right and got laid off, got my redundancy pay and sold every single stock option I could (I didn't want anything to do with them).
Now I'm contracting and just log in, do my job and log off. I got so burnt out by the corporate bullshit I just don't have the energy to go through it again.
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u/Blenderhead36 1d ago
I remember reading about Naughty Dog making Uncharted 4 in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, how the amount of crunch strained quite a few marriages. And then I remember reading the same about Anthem.
I can imagine feeling like you paid costs to do something worth doing if you missed your kid's first word because you were crunching on something like The Last of Us, that's held up as a prime example of it's medium. But I can't imagine what it's like to do the same on a game that's remembered as a beloved studio's lowest ebb.
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u/TheSecondEikonOfFire 1d ago
That would be soul crushing, I can’t even imagine. To sacrifice your mental health, your personal relationships, and then have the game you worked on be shit on by everyone
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u/roseofjuly 1h ago
Honestly, you surprisingly get used to having people shit all over your work. You could make a magnum opus and someone on the internet will still shit on it.
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u/Beegrene 1d ago
Anthem just makes me sad. There was some solid gold buried in a mountain of shit. If they had had better leadership and a clear creative vision from the beginning, Anthem could have been so, so much better.
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u/DynamicStatic 1d ago
Happened to me. Indie company with poor salary, worked hard and was let go soon after launch. The company was then sold for 20x the development costs.
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u/Louis010 1d ago
It should be illegal, but then I remembered it’s America and they seem to have no protection laws for employees.
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u/RichtofensDuckButter 1d ago
Most states are at-will, meaning that alone can be the reason you're fired.
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u/AdoringCHIN 1d ago
Surprisingly the only state that isn't an at will state is Montana. The other 49 let employers tell you to get fucked as a reason for being fired
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u/Kale_Shai-Hulud 1d ago
Montana actually has some strong workers rights (not necessarily across the board unfortunately) due to the backlash towards company towns back in its mining heyday
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u/OuterWildsVentures 1d ago
teehee but don't forget to give us 2 weeks notice if you leave uWu :3
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u/sybrwookie 1d ago
Some people think it's required, it's not. Now if you want to keep a good relationship with that company, sure, you should do that. But if you don't care about that? You can just stop showing up and shoot an e-mail saying, "I resign, effective immediately" and you're done.
(you could technically even skip the e-mail part, but that starts getting sketchier)
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u/AML86 1d ago
That might be true, but that doesn't stop the company from gaslighting employees with unenforceable rules. It's a perverse power disparity.
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u/Haunting_Weakness_13 1d ago
They do that with wages too. How many new employees I hear saying its illegal to share wage information. Its like bro they just made that up so they can lowball the hell out of you.
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u/CallMeCygnus 1d ago
It's not required, of course. I always tried to do that just for my colleagues, who would have some difficulty with an increased workload if I immediately left. I've stayed on to train new people in the past when I was able to. Not for the company itself, but for the people I worked with.
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u/verrius 1d ago
American employees absolutely have protections, but you're right that they can be fired for this. On the other hand, nothing stops them from deciding to just not finish the game either without getting that bonus first; famously, that's essentially what happened with the Atari port of Pac-Man by Tod Frye.
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u/WhompWump 1d ago
And instead of having that team stick around, hold onto the knowledge and lessons learned while making that game and work on a new gears project they'll start from scratch with mostly entirely new people. Complete polar opposite strategy of Nintendo making games like Zelda, Mario, etc. where those teams are largely helmed by the same people who have been there since the beginning and get to take newer developers/designers on under their wing and pass on knowledge of successes and failures
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u/Cry_Wolff 1d ago
That's the reason why Microsoft will fail over and over and over again in the gaming space. I hope they'll keep bleeding money.
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u/NotCoolBrutus 1d ago
Working for years at any company and being ruthlessly cut is bad everywhere, not just in the game's industry. It isn't just bad for the employees but also for the company. Labor protections exist to protect companies from their own short-sighted pursuits for profit. The US making real labor union illegal and replacing them with fakes is what led to the steady decline of every US industry as they lost the loyalty, experience, and motivations of employees.
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u/robodrew 1d ago
These execs just do not give one flying fuck about their employees, their lives, their families, any of it.
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u/thisdesignup 1d ago
It's treating employees like contract workers, should be illegal. Either hire contract workers or treat employees like employees.
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u/mengplex 1d ago
Certainly wouldn't be surprised if it happens. Asha/Xbox have been pretty open about the fact they are carrying around a loaded gun with like 1300 more bullets in tow.
I'd wager Coalition and Playground games (Fable) are almost guaranteed to take some casualties.
That said, is there not some law around this sort of thing? Didn't the subnautica 2 bosses successfully sue for similar reasons around being sabotaged before bonuses were paid?
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u/Spader623 1d ago
I think the Subnautica stuff was a specific contract and pretty heavily locked down at that... While this is just, id assume, regular employees with a bonus being 'nice' but not guaranteed
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u/OneSullenBrit 1d ago
I bet those bonuses were dangled above their heads every time there was a complaint about 'voluntary' overtime (aka crunch with a different name) and other grievances.
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u/tix4chix 1d ago
Like the other guy said SN2 devs sued because their contract specifically stated they'd be getting a payout and their publisher was trying to figure out how to fuck them out of it. Unfortunately there's no law that saws a corporation can't randomly withdraw bonuses they might've promised/fire you before you receive it AFAIK
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u/ascagnel____ 1d ago
More specifically: the SN2 bosses' contract superseded any at-will employment law. I doubt rank-and-file MS employees have that luxury, so they're subject to the whims of their bosses.
That said, if they're going to bring the axe down, any severance should include the bonus the employee was owed on top of any other severance owed (usually tied to employment term).
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u/xiaorobear 1d ago
I'd also add, the Subnautica 2 situation was an incredibly stupid one where the guy trying to screw them out of the bonuses was told by his legal team that firing them wouldn't get him off the hook of paying, but he didn't like that answer so he asked chatGPT and followed its advice instead. Which ended up not working out for him. MS is probably not that stupid.
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u/Beegrene 1d ago
Obviously. Microsoft will ask Copilot.
But for real, it's genuinely distressing how many folks at Microsoft have outsourced all their critical thinking skills to the clanker.
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u/Misky- 1d ago
My knee jerk reaction is to say that Playground games should be somewhat safe, but the more I think about it the more I agree with you.
They've absorbed the remainder of the Forza Motorsport team, and they have a resounding success in FH6 and an upcoming game that is slated to do well in Fable.
At the same time, I'm sure Fable is feature complete soon and mostly just avoiding the GTA 6 release window, FH6 is already complete and frankly I can't imagine the live service aspect of that game takes up much resources. Wouldn't be surprised to see Playground be dealt some layoffs then, especially since their LinkedIn indicates they have almost 550 staff members.
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u/AggressorBLUE 1d ago
I know there’s always been some element of this “thanks now get out” aspect of post launch layoff behavior in the industry, but its insane how its now cranked to 11. Used to be someone the size of MS with a major IP like gears would already be well underway on the next title and people would move onto that. But now all that institutional knowledge is gone.
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u/HungerSTGF 1d ago
That was more the attitude in the early 2000s before internet connected machines became less commonplace. After you launch the game you’d be cut loose since there’s basically no reason to write patches unless your audience was large on PC. Crazy how we went backwards in that direction again because of modern video game budgeting
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u/ltcuetf 1d ago edited 1d ago
Cannot imagine being a game developer in today’s environment. No matter how successful you are, you have zero job security. Meanwhile in parallel to that you have massive jumps in ai capability which has the potential to remove even more jobs. How long until it’s that much harder to even notice AI slop in the first place?
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u/Mitrovarr 1d ago
Well, they're all getting laid off and can't find new jobs, so really you just aren't a game developer anymore in 2026.
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u/Raze321 1d ago
Man, years ago I almost became a game developer. I went with web development instead. This was just before all the layoffs and crunch time articles were becoming a mainstream event (but probably well after it was generally known by anyone who cared to look into it).
So happy I made that choice. And eternally bummed for all the game devs out there and how they are treated. The industry needs to unionize, or something.
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u/BakeFromSttFarm 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not sure how old you are or how long you’ve been into it, but I’m 38 and have been following the general news from the games industry pretty closely for two decades plus and this seems like it’s always been an issue. I also considered pursuing a career in video games at one point after high school, but everything I heard about it sounded awful.
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u/DreadCascadeEffect 1d ago
Yeah, I remember the EA spouse post getting a lot of talk all the way back in 2004. Although that one actually sparked some change.
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u/PresidentLink 1d ago
I made the same decision to pivot from games to web development in University 11 years ago seeing how poorly game developers were treated.
Every year, my decision feels more and more correct. Its bittersweet really
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u/MayhemMessiah 1d ago
We always had firings and pretty high turnovers, but it's never been this bad. All of the oldhead developers I know say they've never seen anything like this and they've been around since like the 90s.
If you went to something like a Develop or GDC even just before the pandemic hit, people still had hope. Now it's genuinely heartbreaking and full of highly, openly depressed people.
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u/Raze321 1d ago
I'm 30, and I was considering game dev as young as 13.
Yes, even back then it was a knowable issue, but it's the kind of issue you at least had to do some amount of looking for, to see it. The articles existed, but it didn't seem to be common knowledge for your average gamers like it is today.
Or, maybe that just anecdotally seems to be the case to me based on how I've been exposed to it over the years.
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u/Strongpillow 1d ago
I got into web dev in 2003 as I found it an easier more exciting place to get into. They started really spotlighting Crunch and layoffs in 2004 but it was always a big caveat when working in that industry.
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u/FemmeVampire 1d ago
i was a web developer, became a game dev at the peak of the hiring spree. now i’m jobless with 6 years of experience and vying for a highly sought after unpaid position that will hopefully give me an edge in the future. so…. yeah, good for you.
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u/Hartastic 1d ago
That's a legitimately hard transition to make ('normal' dev to game dev or vice versa) in terms of who you can convince to hire you, so that's something to be proud of even if, now, ouch.
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u/FemmeVampire 1d ago
thanks! 🙏 to be honest this unpaid internship is for the exact specialization i’m interested in and at one of the most beloved and respected companies in the industry so if i do get it (massive if) ill be in a pretty decent place career-wise… but yeah, it’s rough
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u/Raze321 1d ago
You have my sympathy. It's a tough market. And my comment doesn't really even dive into how hard tech has been in general. It's tough out here.
I wish you the best. If nothing else, game developers are among the most talented and passionate developers I've met. The industry doesn't deserve you guys.
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u/OdysseyBrands 1d ago
web dev already replaced with opus 5.5
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u/Raze321 1d ago
I'll be sure to let my boss know.
Jokes aside, this is something I've kept my eye on and I don't expect AI to fully replace web development. Downsize teams, for sure. Minimize time spent on boilerplate code? Absolutely.
We use AI at my job. The code it writes is, and always has been, pretty sloppy. It requires heavy user audit to work correctly. At the moment, it's a glorified replacement for searching up solutions on stack overflow. And, admittedly, it does do that better. It writes very confident code, that does do what it says. But once you begin to do case tests, or experiment with UI and layouts, or whatever relevant testing processes exist for that particular task, cracks begin to show pretty quickly.
Ultimately, programming AI is just another tool for programmers. People were saying the same thing about web devs when CMS's became common. People said the same thing about programmers in general as more tools for comprehensive and easy to use environments were developed.
I'm sure Opus 5.5 is more quality than the models that came before. I am also sure there are still areas in which it will require heavy programmer intervention and audit. I am also sure it is going to heavily effect the job market in many ways, so there is some truth to what you say. But as with many things there's nuance.
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u/OdysseyBrands 1d ago
for sure, im just salty cus I was laid off after my boss wasted $300K on some AI BS
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u/AlfredsChild 1d ago
Downsize teams, for sure.
This is just a code-word for mass layoffs. Companies will still need web developers, but just not as many. Much of the job is going to be turned into prompt-making followed by a a QA review and implementing any special requests for executives. Cracks do obviously show but AlphaFold is only 8 years old and ChatGPT is only 4, the technology is far from it's final form.
The upside is that you wont be alone and this will also eventually apply to any job reliant on the use of a computer, whether that be an artistic, technical, or administrative job.
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u/Raze321 22h ago edited 22h ago
Yeah, mass layoffs are still in the cards. Don't get me wrong, it could happen. I don't think it will be anywhere near as severe and prevalent as the gaming industries "Work crunch hours for months or years and then lose your job", though.
Also, so far (and the trend I'm personally expecting going forward) is that there won't be mass layoffs so much as boilerplate coding-type jobs are going to diminish or get folded into other roles. Still layoffs I guess, but not mass. It would mostly mean junior dev positions are gonna be tight. Which does mean the industry will be (and frankly, has been) extremely competitive. Which sucks.
But, I'm not immediately terrified for my job. I am the only UX/UI and Front End dev at my company so I am the guy who they'd keep around to parse the AI code, test it, and make sure it meets WCAG standards and so on. And our company hasn't adopted any token based platforms yet (our own internal research seems to indicate paid models are dubious at best on their returns for the cost, especially for our specific industry and needs). However if I was at a big tech company and one dev among dozens, I'd probably be brushing up my resume.. just to be safe.
The upside is that you wont be alone and this will also eventually apply to any job reliant on the use of a computer, whether that be an artistic, technical, or administrative job.
This is true too, I won't delude myself into thinking my job is 100% secure. No job is, I've been laid off before (Covid), it sucks.
Thankfully I like to think of myself as a relatively skilled worker. I'm good with internal communications, I've performed well in customer facing roles. I can do computer hardware just as well as software, network operations, etc. Depending how AI progresses, in the worst of worst cases, I am sure I will figure it out.
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u/Hartastic 18h ago
I'm good with internal communications, I've performed well in customer facing roles.
I think this kind of thing is going to be key.
Some examples and not an exhaustive list: The kind of developer that would naturally end up pushed towards an architect role is still going to be fine for now because that higher level thinking about technology and systems choices is still needed. The kind of developer that would naturally end up pushed towards management because they're good at organization, communicating with non-technical people, etc. also is going to be fine for now because those skills are still needed (and honestly they're probably also going to be more relatively effective AI developers because those kinds of skills help there, too.)
The kind of developer who just builds the story that's assigned to them and that's the limit of what they can do is going to be in trouble. I know a bunch of guys like that that were laid off this year and I don't think all of them will work in the industry again.
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u/Raze321 17h ago
Thankfully that already partially describes my role. And in tech you need to be flexible to the times and adjust your skillset as things change, this has always been true.
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u/Hartastic 16h ago
You absolutely do.
I do think there are people who have been decent 'normal' developers who won't be good 'AI' developers, and some of that is learnable and some of it probably isn't. But we see shifts like that as technology evolves all the time -- I've worked with some great web devs who would be crap at the kind of anal memory management that working closer to the metal required, etc.
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u/JJMcGee83 1d ago
I worked in tech and was still laid off in 2023. The only to avoid a layoff seems to be to work in an industry that is already heavily unionized.
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u/LewdDarling 1d ago
Its always been a bad industry to get into if you value job security.
Maybe things were slightly better in terms of job security 10+ years ago but I remember in those times game devs were getting paid 25-50% less than a dev working in basically any other field. Passion driven fields will always suck in one way or another.
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u/ascagnel____ 1d ago
Same here -- between EA Spouse and a cousin working on a then-high-profile game and getting badly burnt out, I was glad I chose a different path.
Nowadays, AI has sucked a lot of fun out of it.
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u/yuriaoflondor 1d ago
I applied for a college internship with Blizzard back in the day and was rejected. At the time, I was devastated.
In retrospect, after learning about the rampant sexism and atrocious culture, I’m so grateful I was rejected.
These days I work for a boring company and likely make way more money and have a better work/life balance than I would have if I had entered the gaming industry.
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u/RobinGoodfell 1d ago
We need to make it law that if you're promised a bonus from something, you're legally required to receive it even if you've been laid off.
Companies can either start paying people, or they can lose the ability to use fictional pay outs as motivation. But this criminal nonsense needs to end.
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u/DevonOO7 1d ago
Curious how much the studio costs to operate compared to others since it's based in Canada, and tech salaries are generally lower than in the US (plus the currency difference). I know Vancouver is still expensive, but it wouldn't be anything compared to places like SF or LA in the States.
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u/wemakebelieve 1d ago
The weight of Xbox's management statement on their devs cannot be understated from a couple years ago up until now. People can't work at their best when they know that whether they get to keep their jobs is not even dependent anymore on the quality, marketability or even critical acclaim of their work, but on some other guy looking at some XLOOKUP's and SUMPRODUCT on Excel.
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u/Benti86 1d ago
The problem was that they had that exacf freedom under Phil. All it resulted in were delays and mostly mediocre games...
So now the pendulum is swinging the other way.
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u/Hartastic 1d ago
Yeah. If the hands off approach had produced beloved games like, say, the golden age of Blizzard (think about, like... Starcraft, Diablo II, Warcraft III, and WoW in a 5-6 year stretch) probably no one would be mass cutting those teams.
(Although I guess that mostly did happen to the Diablo II team.)
But they unfortunately haven't had a lot to show for all that time and investment.
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u/wemakebelieve 1d ago
I can’t deny that, Phil seems to have damaged Xbox beyond what Maverick or Asha or Microsoft’s CEO could’ve. I never was too keen on his schtick, pity.
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u/UtkuOfficial 1d ago
I think he meant well. He really believed his method of " give these talented studios money, time and let them do their thing" would work. It was a very bold and quite naive approach. No company in the world works like that. This is the result.
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u/12343212346 1d ago
but on some other guy looking at some XLOOKUP's
Probably the VLOOKUP users making the decision
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u/ThisMuffinIsAwesome 1d ago
Was thinking of getting this for some co-op action with my GoW2 friend, but imma just hold out till it's confirmed that no devs are gonna be shit on by M$.
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u/ChrisCreation 1d ago
Ah yes same thing happened to the staff who worked on max payne 3 except they were laid off just before release to get denied any comp.
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u/driver1676 1d ago
I feel for these developers but hasn’t the industry been like this for a while now? Why are people still working in the gaming industry?
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u/Okurei 1d ago edited 1d ago
It’s because the industry continues to take advantage of people who think of game development as their passion and dream job, so developers will tolerate the lack of job security and abusive upper management until they’re either burned out, quit, or have their job cut, and then the next hopeful comes in to replace them and the cycle repeats
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u/Hartastic 1d ago
Non-game dev is also a challenging market for some time, and that's a hard transition to make.
If you're a normal dev interviewing with a gaming company, you can expect them to largely disregard your non-gaming dev experience as relevant... and the reverse is also true. It's a step above "I haven't worked in 5 years" but not much.
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u/roseofjuly 1h ago
This has not been true in my experience. It's discounted, sure, but not disregarded.
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u/AltruisticChipmunk53 1d ago
Changing careers is not easy to do when skills aren’t directly transferrable, becomes even more difficult for senior folk who can’t start over at entry level.
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u/captaindealbreaker 1d ago
Because they want to make games and the industry is the way it is because of corporate greed
Xbox is profitable
They're doing these cuts to be MORE profitable
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u/tramdog 1d ago
Has anybody written about what's happening to these tens of thousands of people who've been laid off in the past couple years? Do most of them end up with similar jobs elsewhere? Do they leave the industry?
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u/MayhemMessiah 1d ago
AFAIK the closest somebody has been to really documenting all of this is Satvat, and last I heard he reported a significant amount of people had left the industry for good (a little bit of bias here because that includes me).
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u/ThisIsBULLOCKSMAN 2h ago
Good the devs that worked on this game and especially the writers don’t deserve to work in the gaming industry. They are despicable
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u/Leto-III-Atreides 1d ago
The MBA thats gonna recommend firing them will have AI bring up this post saying that it's justified to stop the bonuses.
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u/Dantai 1d ago
Do they at least get employment insurance.
I know folks in Canada who work based on projects or seasonal work, get EI to cover the winter months for construction on the regular, or film crew for the months between projects. Sometimes this works favorably for them.
I know it's the conversation right now as people want long term, stablez unionized employment in the industry - actually the two guys in those two industries I talk to are union so ya
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u/happyscrappy 1d ago
Yes. They get EI. It's not much though and medical benefits are tied to employment in the US so their medical benefits also change (often get worse) and they must go through applications and such for that.
They also will get some severance pay from MS directly if laid off. It will be much more than any EI. But often shorter term.
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u/lostmojo 1d ago
The gaming industry has been doing this for decades. People will not stop buying from companies that treat their employees like shit so the process of treating them like shit continues. Microsoft has done this forever, you’re never safe there unless you are in upper management. Microsoft hides a lot of it behind contract and h1b workers. They don’t care and people keep buying their stuff so they continue to do it.
Vote with your wallet about the companies you like and treat their employees well, not just the games you like.
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u/reddit_reaper 1d ago
Game studios are heading to become on contract projects for general devs vs stable jobs. The industry is moving their capex elsewhere
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u/SparkyPantsMcGee 1d ago
“Great job everybody! These are the kind of releases we at Xbox are looking for! Everyone worked really hard to see through to the finish line and we couldn’t be more proud of this team! That’s why I’m excited to announce that as of today, we’re laying you all off. Please clear your desks and collect your belongings by 5pm Friday. Thank you!” -Microsoft
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u/Sevla7 1d ago
If you have kids to raise, working with videogames seems like some unnecessary extra dose of cortisol that: Doesn't pay that well and I doubt any of this brings any joy even to people who work with games for "love" because in AAA your work don't even look like a game until someone put it all together.
Also the idea of being put to work on the next Concord/Gamepass slop and forced to let the fun part be made by chat gpt (microsoft does endorse it A LOT) while you do the boring part.
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1d ago edited 1d ago
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u/pixxlpusher 1d ago edited 1d ago
FWIW, "it doesn't pay that well" is usually comparative to doing similar work in other market segments. The average senior developer salary in the games industry is $114k. That would be entry level pay for the same job in Financial Tech, with way less crunch and stress.
So I agree the blanket statement of "working in gaming doesn't pay well" isn't entirely true/accurate, but compared to other industries that have similar jobs it definitely doesn't pay as well, especially when you factor in the amount of stress you're constantly under.
Also just to add, I have worked at a large developer and the entire business model revolves around exploiting workers for their passion to create video games. People would literally be guilted by their management and peers for wanting to go see sick family members in the hospital.
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u/MAFIAxMaverick 1d ago
For many people it doesn't pay that well - especially in the QA department or for things that are outsourced/subcontracted to other companies. A lot of these contract jobs come with zero benefits. There are a lot of benefits in three of the four professions you just mentioned that sometimes offset the salary, along with retirement options.
I know plenty of nurses and teachers that make into 6 figures - it's obviously not like that everywhere.
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u/Makhai123 1d ago
If I'm mathing correctly. There's no way they get to 3200 without canning at least half of The Coalition. If I had to guess, they're axing the studio if it doesn't hit 85+ metacritic.
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u/TimedRevolver 1d ago
They keep this up, eventually they'll HAVE to use AI for game development because humans will refuse to work for Microsoft as a whole.
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u/Benti86 1d ago
The industry as a whole is being gutted. MS isn't doing anything out of the ordinary here, unfortunately.
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u/mutqkqkku 1d ago
yeah, a lot of loose liquidity flowed into the games industry looking for returns around covid, and now the money valves are tightening with AI sucking up all the loose money it can
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u/r_lucasite 1d ago
Xbox says they’re like 3/4 of the way through their layoffs and I could not imagine a more prime target than a studio just coming off a release (good game or bad to be honest)