It seems Xbox is headed to another round of brutal job cuts which can reportedly impact ‘Hundreds’ of employees and lead to consolidation of multiple studios, and moreover, may take place as early as next week. And if the reports are true, this will be the second batch of layoffs in Xbox this year after around 1600 number of developers were let go in June, as a part of the ongoing ‘Reset’ process in the company.
The merging of multiple smaller studios into bigger ones may happen this time around as well, and the most notable impact of this could be seen in the development of the Halo franchise which may move under Activision now, and means further entries could be made by Activision or studios under the brand.
Ever since the first wave of layoffs hit Xbox in June, it’s been known that another round of job cuts will follow before the end of this year, and according to a new report by The Information, the second wave of redundancies will arrive this coming week and could potentially impact hundreds of employees and merging of multiple game studios.
Also, reliable leaker NateTheHate has responded to the new report, saying: ‘more than just Halo will be moving under ABK. Other studios will move to different companies within XBOX/MS.’
Another claim suggests Activision’s Call of Duty studios will be merged this time which will lead to a significant decrease of their overall footprint, however, you may want to take this one with a grain of salt, as of right now.
Also, according to Jason Schreier, Blizzard may also receive heavy losses in the coming round of layoffs, as he stated during a podcast appearance in the recent Tokyo Game Show.
It feels really unfair that whenever there’s a large-scale adjustment or restructuring of any kind in huge corporations like Microsoft, it’s the employees who end up paying for it in the form of unfortunate layoffs and job cuts. Overall, it’s definitely a sad time for the industry to lose so many talented developers in these waves of layoffs.
