Microsoft is cutting another 650 jobs in its gaming division, Stephen Totilo reported in today’s Game File newsletter. The article includes a quote from an internal email sent this morning to employees by Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer:
As part of aligning our post-acquisition team structure and managing our business, we have made the decision to eliminate approximately 650 roles across Microsoft Gaming—mostly corporate and supporting functions—to organize our business for long term success.
This time around, no games, devices, or experiences will be affected by the job cuts. That wasn’t the case with the previous mass layoffs of 1,900 employees across Xbox, Activision Blizzard, and Bethesda, which resulted in the cancellation of Odyssey, Blizzard’s survival game based on a brand new IP.
It has been a year of layoffs across the whole industry. On January 22, Riot Games announced that 530 staff members had been laid off. Sony Interactive Entertainment and Electronic Arts followed suit in late February, removing 900 and 670 employees, respectively. On the occasion, Sony also shut down the London studio that was making a modern fantasy online cooperative action game.
In March, SEGA sold Relic Entertainment and laid off around 240 employees across its European teams. The following month, it was Take-Two’s turn to reduce its workforce by 5% and shut down OlliOlli developer Roll7 and Intercept Games, canceling some unannounced games in the process.
The bad news kept coming with Microsoft shutting down three studios in May, including Arkane Austin (Dishonored, Prey, Redfall) and Tango Gameworks (The Evil Within, Ghostwire: Tokyo, and Hi-Fi Rush), while Roundhouse Studios got folded into ZeniMax Online. Tango Gameworks (or what was left of it anyway, since about half of the employees had already found employment elsewhere) was subsequently acquired by Krafton in August alongside the Hi-Fi Rush IP.
We would like to believe this latest round of Microsoft layoffs will be the final news of this kind we report this year, but there’s a solid chance that won’t be the case.
