The ongoing mass layoffs in Xbox has seen a total of 1600 staff losing their jobs this past week and 3200 employees scheduled to be let go by the end of the current fiscal year and multiple studios including Compulsion Games, Double Fine, Ninja Theory possibly going independent. And now many players in the platform have decided to take a stand against the mass layoffs via the Xbox Player Voice Forum with a request to end the ongoing job cuts and studio closures.
Witt Yao, a player on the Xbox platform had posted the following, which asks Microsoft to stop the current restructuring process that has already impacted thousands of developers and workers:
“The layoff of 3,200 workers at Xbox (across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, Obsidian, id Software, and Xbox Game Studios) is unacceptable,” said Yao.
“This continues a pattern that has led to 10,000+ layoffs at Xbox in as little as two years. Multiple studios have been closed or had their futures jeopardized (Compulsion Games, Double Fine, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games, and Roundhouse Studios) and numerous games have been cancelled. The developers and players agree that this cannot continue.”
Yao’s post has become highly trending on the forum with now over 3000 votes supporting the demand while many other players also expressing their views on the layoffs which is that letting go of all the enormous talents can’t be the solution to Xbox’ current challenges related to growth.
One of the biggest by products of these mass layoffs is that mostly the smaller studios and titles are being affected while huge franchises like GTA, Call of Duty remain out of the harm’s way. This will likely lead to a severe reduction of the overall diversity of games in the industry where only the bigger and more established franchises can thrive and others don’t.
Xbox CEO Sharma had stated in her ‘Reset’ memo that the brand is not in a healthy place right now hence the necessity of the layoffs and job cuts: “Our business today is not healthy. We are operating at margins that are 3–10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. We entered Gen 9 with a smaller install base and a higher cost structure. To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content.”
“While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected. As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added more teams, more investment, and more time, hoping for a better outcome. And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history. We must reset XBOX.”
