Well, there you go. Jason Schreier reported yesterday that XBox is going to cut 3200 jobs and either sell or divest themselves of 5 studios.
An internal email from Asha Sharma, the current CEO of XBox, outlined everything. She also said that she wants 1 billion players per day for XBox overall (this starts at the 4:58 mark in the video above). She also mentions that they want to focus their investments in XBox, which pretty much means for these bigger studios to shed projects that won't generate as much profit and eyeballs on screens.
From what it sounds, XBox Game Studios and Zenimax will be hit hard by layoffs, and Activision Blizzard King less so but still impacted. The overall number of jobs being lost is 3200, but only 1600 right now. That translates into waves of layoffs going forward, including divestiture/sale from the studios already identified. (Apparently Arkane Studios is also targeted, but Microsoft has begun the divestiture process with the French Work Council, as they can't summarily be canned without due process.)
What does that mean for those who love the two big MMOs that these studios manage, Elder Scrolls Online and World of Warcraft? Probably job cuts and scaling back of the staffing for both teams.
For all those expecting Classic Plus, here's hoping that these cuts don't kill it off.
I would expect, however, far more monetization of both properties to try to boost profits. So, if you've been dismayed at some of Cash Shop options from World of Warcraft, hold onto your hat. You ain't seen nothing yet.
There will be a lot more integration of these various game studios with the Microsoft parent organization, so that Zenimax or Activision/Blizzard or King (it's marked separately from A-B in the email) will lose a lot of their independence and corporate culture. Will that impact the end product? Yes, it will; you don't change corporate culture without changing the product itself. Hell, this happens all the time in Corporate America: the old enshittification process writ large. The back office jobs, or those not labelled "critical" to a game studio are about to get cut.
Let's hope that these studios aren't saddled with having to use a single engine for all of their development in the same way that Bioware got trapped by EA into using Frostbite for their game engine for the past several games, despite it being NOT built for RPGs or ARPGs at all.
I noticed that Jason didn't mention Obsidian with the letter, but I have to think that it won't have escaped unscathed. Helluva time for Tim Cain to move back to California to rejoin Obsidian after being in semi-retirement.
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