On the morning of 6 July, an email went out from Asha Sharma, the chief executive of Xbox, to all of the division’s employees around the world. Under the headline “Resetting Xbox”, it announced the most significant restructuring in the history of Microsoft’s console business: 3,200 staff would be laid off throughout the financial year to 2027, and 1,600 of those roles would be eliminated immediately. An hour later, at studios throughout company, the Teams meeting invites started arriving.
We were just brought in, told the news and it was like: ‘You guys are going to lose access to your Slack channel.’ So you saw a flurry of goodbye messages before everything was just shut off.” This, it seems, was the routine, at least at studios in North America: a Teams call with a studio head, a prepared statement read, then a warning about Slack (the group messaging app widely used at game development studios). Emails, the staff were told, would be turned off a few days later. Here’s my contact information.
I will miss all of you.’” Then silence. Bethesda Games Studios and Zenimax Online Studios were unionised in 2024 and both Goin and Barrett are on the bargaining committees for their respective studios, currently in talks with Microsoft. In the US, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) act is a federal law that requires companies with 100 or more employees to give its workers 60 days’ notice before major closures or mass staff layoffs.
Consequently, affected staff at US studios will be paid until 4 September. Union reps at Bethesda are undertaking a bargaining process with Microsoft to negotiate severance packages and any benefits owed, and is attempting to get at least some affected members re-employed. Rallies are taking place outside studio buildings across North America, with the Bethesda union seeking support from gamers via social media.
Staff say rumours had been circulating about a new wave of lay-offs for several weeks, and that they saw the Bloomberg article on 10 June warning of coming job cuts. I mean, Bethesda Games Studios is Skyrim, it’s Fallout. We have really highly anticipated stuff coming out.
We thought that the work we were doing was going to keep us safe. And instead, we got brought into a meeting that was two minutes long, to end, in some cases, decades of career at the company. It was just devastating.” “I remember, I laughed the whole day because I was in complete disbelief,” Barrett adds.
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