Besides id Software, another studio to receive some of the heaviest tolls in the ongoing ‘Reset’ process at Xbox is Bethesda and in response, union workers in the company are set to go on a strike starting 15th July, according to Insider Gaming. The current mass layoff in Xbox has resulted in job cuts of around 440 employees at Bethesda and ZeniMax and the CWA-affiliated Bethesda Game Studios union, OneBGS, aims to organize marches outside the company’s studios in Montreal, Quebec, Rockville, Maryland, Austin, Texas, and Dallas.
The protest marches are set to start on Wednesday, July 15, at 12:30 PM Eastern Time and in the following statement, the workers of the union have also outlined the steps they’re going to take regarding the current situation at Bethesda studios:
“The company wants us to accept this as a done deal and quietly disappear. We won’t let that happen. Our next steps are to mobilize. We need every single member visible and unified. To that end, we are announcing our Save Our Devs March across all studios on Wednesday, July 15th.
We need to show management right now that we mean business, so they will properly take care of our fellow co-workers today and think twice before ever attempting something like this again. Stay strong, look out for one another, and we look forward to seeing us all marching together on the 15th.”
Xbox is currently going through a massive ‘Reset’ which will see a total of 1600 layoffs taking place this past week and 3,200 employees being let go by the end of the current fiscal year. Also, four studios including Arkane Lyon, Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games will be sold off and all of them possibly going independent with Compulsion already has as confirmed by the devs themselves while Arkane studios is “beginning required consultation with its Works Council”.
It’s inherently unfair that whenever huge corporations like Microsoft or Ubisoft has major company-wide adjustments and restructuring, it’s always the employees who end up paying for it in the form of mass layoffs and job cuts.
